Quotes by American Authors - Page 587

With the past I have nothing to do nor with the future. I live now.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare, and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about.
John Green
It's so frustrating that everybody rags on eighties music, when there's a lot of terrific stuff out there," he said. "There's no irony to it. It's not afraid to just be happy or enthusiastic or earnest. Or to have melody. Sure, you can blame it for being naive, but isn't that refreshing next to the whiny navel-gazing that came after it?
Amanda DeWees
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
Eugene O'Neill
A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
Jack London
Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books.
Jackson Pearce
The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.
Steven Pinker
We trace the hand of the Almighty in framing the constitution of our land, and believe that the Lord raised up men purposely for the accomplishment of this object, raised them up and inspired them to frame the Constitution of the United States
Lorenzo Snow
You're nervous around me. I don't bite." He turned his head and swept a gaze over her that went from head to toe and back again. "Unless you like that sort of thing.
Robin Bielman
I want to mark him permanently, brand him as mine. I grab my ankles to keep from grabbing him, digging my short, blunt nails into my flesh, the pain heightening my pleasure.
Cynthia Sax
White bridal dresses stunning and pure, bringing promises, binding two souls together, life forces connected, holding the same vision.
Jennifer Lynch
If there's one common thread throughout all of history, it's that people have always fallen for the wrong people.
Leila Sales
it is, just a door.if you never knock,it may, never open.
JaTawny Muckelvene Chatmon
Master of human destinies am I.Fame, love, and fortune on my footsteps wait,Cities and fields I walk; I penetrateDeserts and seas remote, and, passing byHovel, and mart, and palace, soon or lateI knock unbidden, once at every gate!If sleeping, wake -- if feasting, rise beforeI turn away. It is the hour of fate,And they who follow me reach every stateMortals desire, and conquer every foeSave death; but to those who doubt or hesitate,Condemned to failure, penury, and woe,Seek me in vain and uselessly implore--I answer not; and I return no more.
John James Ingalls
I like the sound of that, crashing Monica's party," he glanced at Michael, then quickly away. "What about you? That break some kind of vampire rules or something?""Blow me Shane.""Boys," Eve said primly. "Language. Minor at the table.""Well," Shane said, "I wasn't actually planning to do it."Claire rolled her eyes. "Not like it's the first time I've heard it. Or said it.""You shouldnt say it," Michael said, all seriousness. "No, I mean it. Girls should say 'eat me' not 'blow me'. Wouldn't recommend 'bite me' though. Not around here.
Rachel Caine
After you are gone, people may forget most of what you have said and done. But they will remember that you loved them.
Steve Goodier
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
Toni Morrison
Practice makes perfect, but nobody's perfect, so why practice?
Kurt Cobain
Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.
Meg Rosoff
Mass shootings are all part of a vast Left-wing conspiracy to undermine the 2nd Amendment and deprive your 6-year-old of his God-given right to bring a Bushmaster to class for "show and tell" ... The one he got from his psychotic, meth-addicted uncle's trailer while the latter was out getting the Confederate flag tattooed on his face. Remember, guns don't kill: the dimwits who insist EVERYONE should have the right to own 'em do.
Quentin R. Bufogle
I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.
Christopher Hitchens
Simply raising the theme of animals in the Third Reich means that our narrative is no longer only an account of what human beings have done to one another, but also about our relations with the natural world. If,viewed against the magnitude and terror of historical events, our personal lives appear almost trivial, the lives of animals may seem more so, and evento raise the subject can at first seem either insensitive or pedantic. At thesame time, this new dimension places the events in an even vaster perspective still, one in which even the greatest battles and horrendouscrimes can begin to fade into insignificance. This is the standpoint of evolutionary time, in which humankind itself may be no more than arelatively brief episode. Perhaps the focus on animals may help us to finda more harmonious balance between the personal, historic, and cosmiclevels, on which, simultaneously we conduct our lives.
Boria Sax
Every day is full of opportunities, but an opportunity is full of only so many days.
Ryan Lilly
A choice of pains. That's what living was all about.
Audre Lorde
We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from govern
William O. Douglas
She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.
Vladimir Nabokov
Magnus, standing by the door, snapped his fingers impatiently. "Move it along, teenagers. The only person who gets to canoodle in my bedroom is my magnificent self.""Canoodle?" repeated Clary, never having heard the word before."Magnificent?" repeated Jace, who was just being nasty. Magnus growled. The growl sounded like "Get out.
Cassandra Clare
I know. I know I’ve been a jerk, and I don’t have a good excuse. But touching you and loving you, and knowing you were planning to leave me, made me crazy. After we made love the second time, I began to think maybe you’d decide to stay with me. I started to think about you and me waking up every day together for the rest of our lives. I even thought about kids and taking some of those breathing classes when you got pregnant. Maybe buying one of those mini-vans.
Rachel Gibson
There is a time and place for electromagnetic shielding and I regard it as a last resort due to the long term biological problems that I have observed with it over the years in plant growth experiments.
Steven Magee
Desire isn't lack, it's surplus energy - a claustrophobia inside your skin -.
Chris Kraus
Art is a creative re-creation of an imaginative or real observation.
Debasish Mridha
I require three things in a man: he must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.
Dorothy Parker
Hell, right now my only weapons were Obnoxious and Snark, and I intended to use them whenever possible.
Diana Rowland
She was pretty sure Seth had practiced all his facial expressions and gestures in front of a mirror, and worked out which ones made him look like a cross between an Abercrombie model and a kitten.
Rainbow Rowell
If you don’t die screaming in this war, then you’re fuckin’ doing it wrong. At least I’m fucking doing it right.
Daniel H. Wilson
There are so many things that demand to be said. Where did you go? Do you ever think about me? You've ruined me. Are you okay? But of course, I can't say any of that.
Gayle Forman
The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.
Thomas Pynchon
As the wireless radiation industry continues to drastically increase the number of transmitters, electromagnetic researchers are documenting the range of new adverse health conditions that are emerging in the masses.
Steven Magee
I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.
Ernest Hemingway
Sign is a live, contemporaneous, visual-gestural language and consists of hand shapes, hand positioning, facial expressions, and body movements. Simply put, it is for me the most beautiful, immediate, and expressive of languages, because it incorporates the entire human body.
Myron Uhlberg
Well, that's why smart people get tripped up with worry and fear. Worry...fear...is just a misuse of the creative imagination that has been placed in each of us. Because we are smart and creative, we imagine all the things that could happen, that might happen, that will happen if this or that happens. See what I mean?
Andy Andrews
Our values call upon us to care about the lives of people we will never meet.
Barack Obama
The man was more temperamental than she was. Not an easy feat. (Mina's view of Diego.)
Maria Grazia Swan
It'll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself.
Ted Chiang
If you never try, you will never know what it means to succeed.
Belle Ami
Rather than seek happiness living my life to please the will of others, I will seek happiness where I know it can be found - living my life to please the will of my heart.
Scott Stabile
It's like an emotional dance party: Some dances will be your favorites -- others more awkward or difficult to learn. Some will be boring or make you mad. some you will wish you never needed to do again. But AHA! You think. I will dance all the dances I can.
S.A.R.K.
Most people create a destiny of minutiae, of the mundane. They create their own limitations. When the moment comes for them to stretch and leap, they find themselves boxed in, locked down by their own fears.
Bill Blais
I think you are very beautiful," René said, "especially when you are admiring mischief." "You must think that every time I look at you, then." He gave her all of his grin. "You admire me, Mademoiselle?
Sharon Cameron
If you're being bombarded with information, the act of looking for patterns – not necessarily finding them – is what going to give you psychic refuge, a sense of sanctuary.
Douglas Copeland
But it always came back to anger.
Cecilia Gray
There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.
Lydia Davis
Why couldn't Mr. Darcy, in the first half hour of the movie, simply walk up to Elizabeth and say, "Hey, I like you. Do you want to go out on a date? And, by the way, I'm filthy rich." I'll tell you why. Because that would defeat the purpose of a chick flick, which is to entertain women and torture men.
David E. Clarke
There are subtle truths buried in every make-believe. You never know where you might find one.
Shari Arnold
Anyone who takes the time to attentively listen is either an old soul or a romantic one.
Richelle E. Goodrich
We only came close to dying six or seven times, which I thought was pretty good. Once, I lost my grip and found myself dangling by one hand from a ledge fifty feet above the rocky surf. But I found another handhold and kept climbing. A minute later Annabeth hit a slippery patch of moss and her foot slipped. Fortunately, she found something else to put it against. Unfortunately, that something was mt face."Sorry," she murmured."S'okay," I grunted, though I'd never really wanted to know what Annabeth's sneaker tasted like.
Rick Riordan
Happiness is a way station between too much and too little.
Channing Pollock
Take your time, but don't waste your time. There's a difference.
Philip Wang
It is always taking care, but it is difficult, because at times to take care of her is also to cause her pain.
Maggie Nelson