Quotes by American Authors

I'm a romantic.
Tom Cruise
I'm not a romantic.
Jack Kevorkian
I have a smile 24/7.
Candis Cayne
Funny is funny is funny.
Bob Newhart
Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?
Kate Millett
In 1965, I marched for equality.
Alphonso Jackson
It's not cool to be an alcoholic.
Chester Bennington
A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
Louis L'Amour
Many a man that couldn't direct ye to th' drug store on th' corner when he was thirty will get a respectful hearin' when age has further impaired his mind.
Finley Peter Dunne
Wisdom doesn't automatically come with old age. Nothing does - except wrinkles. It's true, some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place.
Abigail Van Buren
Change is the watchword of progression. When we tire of well-worn ways, we seek for new. This restless craving in the souls of men spurs them to climb, and to seek the mountain view.
Ella Wheeler
Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.
Faith Baldwin
The wind was cold off the mountains and I was a naked man with enemies behind me, and nothing before me but hope.
Louis L'Amour
A woman may develop wrinkles and cellulite, lose her waistline, her bustline, her ability to bear a child, even her sense of humor, but none of that implies a loss of her sexuality, her femininity
Barbara Gordon
Words have the power to make things true if they're said right.
Alden Bell
That was the Old Man’s favorite song. “Blow Ye Trumpet.” Them Negroes was far away from the doings on the plaza where the Old Man was to hang, way out from it. But they sang it loud and clear….Blow ye trumpet blowBlow ye trumpet blow….You could hear their voices for a long way, seemed like they lifted up and carried all the way into the sky, lingering in the air long afterward. And up above the church, high above it, a strange black-and-white bird circled ‘round, looking for a tree to roost on, a bad tree, I expect, so he could alight upon it and get busy, so that it would someday fall and feed the others.
James McBride
Geography and mileage mean nothing. Separate is a single word that covers all distances that aren't together.
Rivera Sun
The world of literature is a sacred mirror that shows not the reality around us but the dreams and fears that reality stimulates: It’s not where we live, but life itself.
Dennis Vickers
Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self-delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving.
Mary Karr
Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost's, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark.
Donna Tartt
It is interesting to ponder the fact that there is no real difference between what the Western Fascists wanted of literature and what the Bolsheviks want. Let me quote: "The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing, however, we demand: acknowledgement of our creed.” Thus spoke one of the big Nazis, Dr. Rosenberg, Minister of Culture in Hitler's Germany. Another quote: “Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan.” Thus spoke Lenin. Both of these are textual quotations, and their similitude would have been highly diverting had not the whole thing been so very sad.
Vladimir Nabokov
Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. I shall be a litterateur, at least, all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California.”EDGAR ALLAN POE TO FREDERICK WILLIAM THOMASFEBRUARY 14, 1849
Andrew Barger
You know what? Fuck it. Just fuck it. The Rising didn't manage to wipe out the human race, it just made us turn into even bigger assholes than we were before. Hear that, mad science? You failed. You were supposed to kill us all, and instead you turned us into monsters.
Mira Grant
It's one of the happy things about a world gone so wrong: your personal freakishness don't stand out so much.
Alden Bell
Nowdays, Rosie the Rivetere was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamall’s discount- appliance emporium.
Colson Whitehead
To stop. To cease, just for a moment. To turn your back on the world, to close your eyes - to see the nothing that is not rather than the nothing that is everywhere around you. To just be quiet in your mind for a little minute. There are paradises even yet on the abandoned plains of the earth -- and they are not filled with fecund flowering Edens but rather just with sweet unerring silences.
Alden Bell
It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.
Vernor Vinge
Kittridge closed his eyes. So, the end. It would happen instantaneously, a painless departure, quicker than thought. he felt the presence of his body one last time: the taste of air in his lungs, the blood surging in his veins, the drumlike beating of his heart. The bomb was dropping toward them."I've got you," he said, hugging Tim fiercely; and again, over and over, so that the boy would be hearing these words. "I've got you, I've got you, I've got you, I've got you.
Justin Cronin
I will murder you by the billions to give you immortality. I will set fire to your civilization to light your way forward. But know this: My species is not defined by your dying, but by your living.
Daniel H. Wilson
Maybe it's ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you're alive for a while, and then you realize you're going to die, and that's such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.Sure, the world seems crazy now. But wouldn't it seem just as crazy if you were alive when they sacrificed peasants, when people were born into slavery, when they killed first-born sons, crucified priests, fed people to lions, burned them on stakes, when they intentionally gave people smallpox or syphilis, when they gassed them, burned them, dropped atomic bombs on them, when entire races tried to wipe other races off the planet? Yes, we've ruined the planet and melted the ice caps and depleted the ozone, and we're always finding new ways to kill one another. Yeah, we're getting cancer at an alarming rate and suicides are at an all-time high, and, sure, we've got people so depressed they take a drug that could turn them into pasty-skinned animals who go around all night dancing and having sex and eating stray cats and small dogs and squirrels and mice and very, very rarely- the statistics say you're more likely to be killed by lightning- a person.But this is the Apocalypse? Fuck you! It's always the Apocalypse. The world hasn't gone to shit. The world is shit.All I'd asked was that it be better managed.
Jess Walter
If anything, global response to the Rising only confirmed something that many Australians had quietly believed for quite some time: If forced to live in Australia for a year, most of the world’s population would simply curl up in a fetal ball and die of terror.
Mira Grant
He's named you heir apparent to the Apocalypse. Congratulations.
Rachel Caine
It was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them.
Hugh Howey
Time for the world to end.
Rick Yancey
The world may be about to end, but if it's going to end, we'll goddamn well give it our best shot first. And this is the place to do it.
Alex Irvine
She knew better than to challenge a man who spent his life preparing for the apocalypse.
Anthony Marra
Everyone should be comfy during the apocalypse.
J. Cornell Michel
She’d found that holding on to him was the easiest and simplest thing to do, not thinking about the bomb, not thinking about the people it killed, not thinking about her family, and not thinking about whether or not she would die. Instead, she’d held tightly around his neck, burying her face in his shoulder. She’d thought the entire world was coming to an end and holding on to him seemed to be the only thing she wanted to acknowledge as real.
Jettie Necole
It must be one of life’s little jokes... how we take everything, even life itself, for granted. We waste our childhoods wishing for what we don’t have, longing for the future, dreaming of ways to speed the time so we can hurry up and see the world. And in our later years, we’d give anything just to slow things down and go back to what we once had.
James Michael Rice
It’s not a war. It’s an annihilation,” he’d mumbled low for her ears only. She’d been unable to respond, only focusing on her own breath and marveling that she in fact was still breathing.
Jettie Necole
Things are different here. There will be rules and regulations that you are not used to. You will have to follow them. All of them.
Jettie Necole
A giant grin, accompanied by a slight chuckle, had been the grand finale to any of his most successful jokes, while the less impressive resulted in a raise of both his brows, which he followed with a semi-satisfied smirk. The least entertaining attempt at humor would get a shrug and a short grimace that reflected he too understood he’d just bombed. Olivia was acquainted with them all now, considering all the time they’d spent together, the most she’d spent with any other individual inside the vault. Olivia had become accustomed to his infectious humor, though it hadn’t always been so. Especially, when they’d first met.
Jettie Necole
Olivia responded with confidence, “You’re the military. You’re in charge. Why would I be scared?
Jettie Necole
You think you’re prepared. You think you’ve done everything you’re supposed to, study hard, work hard, keep yourself out of trouble, and then—whoosh! Something arrives out of the blue that you never saw coming. Something you never even imagined. Something that’ll knock your little world off its axis. Something that’ll either change your life for the better, or end it forever. Chaos.
James Michael Rice
She’d been caught up in that image, that flash, man’s nuclear stamp, and had not really understood what happened after.
Jettie Necole
We’re in an underground vault, and here’s my first order: You’re going to do everything I tell you to do.
Jettie Necole
If only he’d taken one look at her and seen that they were soul mates, swept her off her feet and taken her to Las Vegas to be married in the same little chapel where Britney Spears had been. She laughed to herself. It would probably have lasted just as long, once her mother found out.
Jettie Necole
No, we’ll live. I promise you that.” He’d said it in a way that she couldn’t doubt, the same way he’d snapped his soldiers back into their rank on the helicopter. His words had been soft yet firm, and she wanted to believe in him as his men had, with confidence.
Jettie Necole
He whispered for her ears only as he listed off the facts: “Military are allowed a larger portion. Being second in command restricts me from no room and giving orders is what I’ve been hired to do. As far as ignoring you, that is not the case. I’ve checked up on you, and you are doing well. My intentions have never been to harm you or insult you. You actually are quite breathtaking in that dress and that is the problem, you need not draw attention to yourself. You are my responsibility and the answer to ‘why’ will always be because I have to.
Jettie Necole
Everyone is dangerous in here, can’t you see that?” he warned.
Jettie Necole
Thanks, for saving me.”“I didn’t have a choice,” he said softly.“Everyone has a choice.”“Then mine was easy.”“Easy?”He chuckled. “Olivia, my choice will always be simple when it comes to you...
Jettie Necole
One could speculate that lichens would be among the last inhabitants to succumb on a dying earth at some distant point in the future.
Steven L. Stephenson
Complacency kills. Paranoia is the reason I’m still alive.
D.J. Molles
How would you rather die?" she snapped. "Hiding under your bed or riding Thunder Mountain?
Rick Yancey
A sullied green “S” stood out on a graying backdrop that made for a road marker up there. We called it the wasteland.
Katherine McIntyre
Wasn’t allowed to have pets. I killed my pet cockroach when it crawled into my ear.
Katherine McIntyre
It is also the irrational instinct of religionism, the vague yearning for something to worship—a reflection or shadow of the true devotional principle—which prompts men to project a subjective image of the lower, personal mind, and to endow it with human attributes, and then to claim to receive "revelations" from it; and this—the image of the Beast, or unspiritual mind,—is their anthropomorphic God, a fabulous monster the worship of which has ever prompted men to fanaticism and persecution, and has inflicted untold misery and dread upon the masses of mankind, as well as physical torture and death in hideous forms upon the many martyrs who have refused to bend the knee to this Gorgonean phantom of the beast-mind of man. Truly, where the worshipers of this image of the Beast predominate, the man whose brow and hand are unbranded by this superstition, who neither thinks nor acts in accordance with it, suffers ostracism if not virulent persecution.
James Morgan Pryse
Abandon all nations, the planet drifts to random insect doom.
William S Burroughs
Thoughts have power, influencing humanity's collective path. The difference between Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler lies, ultimately, in how they thought. A thought can change the world for the better—or damn it forever.
Diane Shauer
The death of a young person for no reason is an apocalypse.
Dave Eggers