Author Quotes

Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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)

You may have your suspicions, your fears, you may even believe there is something, somewhere, terribly, drastically wrong, but because someone else is in charge, because there is a part of the system above you which you don't know, you don't question it, you even distrust your own doubts.

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)

There are public lives, personal lives, and private lives. The public life is the one everyone sees in your daily routine, the personal one you reveal to your family and closest friends, but your private life, that's just what you know about yourself, what you hide from everyone else.

Lisa Jackson (author)

Old and ruined, all rotted and broken up These plum trees function gorgeously A few days every year In a way nobody else does.

People can say what they like about the eternal verities, love and truth and so on, but nothing's as eternal as the dishes.

It was popularly supposed that figures couldn't lie, but they did; they lied like the dickens.

Mary Stewart Cutting

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

Young children grow, but adolescents change—and change is confusing. It confuses the sprouting adolescent to wake up every morning in a new body. It confuses the mother and father to find a new child every day in a familiar body—a child contumelious of the things that yesterday's child wanted, a child with a different rhythm of living, a child who talks knowingly about things that yesterday's child never heard of.

Disrespectful words cannot entirely be eaten, ever. Respect is a kind of Humpty Dumpty. All the king's horses can't put it all the way up again.

Charlotte Armstrong

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

Annie Fellows Johnston

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'.

Richard Nordquist

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

Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany

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

The women who take husbands not out of love but out of greed, to get their bills paid, to get a fine house and clothes and jewels; the women who marry to get out of a tiresome job, or to get away from disagreeable relatives, or to avoid being called an old maid — these are whores in everything but name. The only difference between them and my girls is that my girls gave a man his money's worth.

There are deep lines on each side of his mouth and I know they are the scars from the thin blade of life.

Deborah Joy Corey

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

Marilynne Robinson

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.

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

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

Patricia Wentworth

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

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.

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

What was the right level of prosperity, the level that banished dire need but did not satiate, the level that did not threaten the artist in the individual? And how did one stop when one arrived at it?

Nayantara Sahgal