Quotes by American Authors

A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
Louis L'Amour
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
Persons of quality had devoted yester evening and much of the night to liquidating their holdings in the South Sea Company and gathering in clubs and coffeehouses to misinform one another.
Neal Stephenson
Mary Webster was on the blower. Her advance agents saw Hank and me swimming in the middle of the river last night with no clothes on.H'rm, said Atticus. He touched his glasses. I hope you weren't doing the backstroke.
Harper Lee
Put the fire out? Hell no. What we need to do is stoke it.
Jess Walter
Almost nothing is known about Homer, which explains why so much has been written about him.
Richard Armour
Vanity, right?" Nash reappeared in the living room with an open bag of potato chips. "I nominate my venerable brother. He likes to play hero, and one look at him should establish the vanity angle.""Nash!" I really shouldn't have been surprised by the dig. But I was."What?" He raised one brow at me in challenge. "It's okay to call me jealous, but not to call him vain?""Awareness of one's obvious advantages doesn't imply vanity," Tod insisted calmly.Nash turned on him. "Does it imply narcissism?"Tod huffed. "This coming from the guy who owns more hair products than his girlfriend.
Rachel Vincent
Agatha: "If you say anything smug or stuck-up or shallow, I'll have Reaper follow you home."Sophie: "But then I can't talk!
Soman Chainani
My vanity suggested I should take offense, but the deeper part of me was relieved- relieved that he was noble enough to want to make such a sacrifice from his heart rather than from his desire to impress me.
Jody Hedlund
It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.
Edith Wharton
We learn to appreciate what we achieve, no matter how small the achievement, because we do it ourselves. - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live
Rachele Baker
For whatever time I have to live, I intend to enjoy myself." - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live.
Rachele Baker
The failure to accept cancer as a systemic disease is one of the greatest failures in modern medicine.
Michael Lam
Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.
Rebecca Skloot
Almost all the world is natural chemicals, so it really makes you re-think everything. A cup of coffee is filled with chemicals. They've identified a thousand chemicals in a cup of coffee. But we only found 22 that have been tested in animal cancer tests out of this thousand. And of those, 17 are carcinogens. There are ten milligrams of known carcinogens in a cup of coffee and thats more carcinogens than you're likely to get from pesticide residues for a year!
Bruce Ames
Instead of a bucket list Someday Challenge™ wants you to create your Someday Slate™, a list of the things that you have promised yourself to do, things that you planned to do someday! Completing your Someday Slate™ will get you started on finally living your passion now.
David A. Koop
Since cancer is an anaerobic growth, enhancing aerobic metabolism in a cancer patient is like shining daylight on a vampire.
Patrick Quillin
You gave me a forever within the numbered days and I'm grateful.
John Green
Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.
William S Burroughs
The interdependent couple is the new setting and their knowledge of Self is an ancient treasure."-Serena Jade
Serena Jade
Why has no one come to pry me out of here?- Cersei
George R.R. Martin
In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds, but in reality the person has been growing all along, under the surface, and it is only in their new freedom, in their hair-raising aloneness, that the person can allow for these underground things to break through and unfurl themselves in the light.
Nicole Krauss
You should be so lucky to be like me. I allow myself to be disturbed too often. I'll probably end up talking to birds in a park. But you'll probably end up with regrets.
Darnell Lamont Walker
You can run. You can keep running to the ends of the earth. But I won’t be far behind you.”“Ethan—”“No. I will never be far behind you.” He tipped up my chin so that I could do nothing else but look back into his eyes. “Do the things you need to do. Learn to be a vampire, to be a warrior, to be the soldier you are capable of being. But consider the possibility that I made a mistake I regret—and that I’ll continue to regret that mistake and try to convince you to give me another chance until the earth stops turning.
Chloe Neill
I'll never know why it was important to him that the couple (he said it later that he'd never seen them before) would take a picture of the whole Mr. Johnson back to Little Rock.He must have been tired of being crippled, as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame. The high topped shoes and the cane, his uncontrollable muscles and thick tongue, and the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity had simply worn him out, and for one afternoon, one part of an afternoon, he wanted no part of them.I understood and felt closer to him at that moment than ever before or since.
Maya Angelou
Empowered Women 101: A confident woman doesn't have to talk a man into loving her. He either loves her completely, not enough or not at all. Regardless, she doesn't settle for less than she deserves.
Shannon L. Alder
I knew in that moment, we were never meant to surrender our childlike innocence, to trade a world in which we fit like a glove for one that hung on us like ill-fitting hand-me-downs. However, all about us insisted on our membership. And instead of a handshake or a mystical password as entrance into this spurious society, we agreed instead to share a lie, the one that says we’re safe, secure, and fulfilled living this way.
Christina Carson
When you decide to appreciate something, no matter how subtle, you absolutely do pivot and shift your vibration significantly.
Debbianne DeRose
Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me. “Doubt nothing, believe everything,” was my friend’s idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather. I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it! My friend’s empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it.
Charles Simic
Remember that the Tarot is a great and sacred arcanum - its abuse is an obscenity in the inner and a folly in the outer. It is intended for quite other purposes than to determine when the tall dark man will meet the fair rich widow.
Jack Parsons
Then she stood on tiptoe and kissed him sweetly on the lips, “I promise you a love affair with a sun-bathed Austrian princess beyond anything you imagine—in love, in beauty, in intensity. A love that will power you to the end of our time together. You are going to be a fortunate man, Geoffrey Ashbrook.
Paul A. Myers
I know the consequences, Manon,” Ilyse conceded. “I know the fate you endured might one day be my own. But I refuse to be a prisoner for the rest of my life.
Melika Dannese Lux
If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.
Ernest Hemingway
To accuse the American male of not bathing in Paris is merely to flatter him.
Elaine Dundy
Indulgence comes in all varieties: a mouthful of gourmet chocolate, a hot stone massage, a week in Paris or 20 uninterrupted minutes to getlost in a book.
Gina Greenlee
I used to ask myself, ‘Sergei, would you rather spend your money on drink or women?’ and thanks to the club, I spend it on both and am called a patron of the arts.
Melika Dannese Lux
I love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles.
Cole Porter
Between the sands of time is a multitude of truths untold.
Jason E. Royle
I'm saying the American way is to overcome, to conquer, to come out on top. And we do it by spending and eating and screwing our women harder than anyone else. That's all I'm saying.
Neil LaBute
He pondered that a little while and then he asked, do Black people have to pay for their doctors, too? Because that's what TV programs had said. I smiled a little at this and told him it's not only Black people who have to pay for doctors and medical care; all people in America have to. Ah, he said. And suppose you don't have the money to pay? Well, I said, if you don't have the money to pay, sometimes you died. And there was no mistaking my gesture, even though he had to wait for the translator to translate it. We left him looking absolutely nonplussed, standing in the middle of the square with his mouth open and his hand under his chin staring after me, as in utter amazement that human beings could die from lack of medical care. It's things like that that keep me dreaming about Russia long after I've returned.
Audre Lorde
You might have liked the United States more,”” she said. “They’ve got more stuff. And if your spaceship is broken, they can probably fix it better.
Nnedi Okorafor
I can see why people find him [Hugo Chávez] charming. He's very ebullient, as they say. I've heard him make a speech, though, and he has a vice that's always very well worth noticing because it's always a bad sign: he doesn't know when to sit down. He's worse than Castro was. He won't shut up. Then he told me that he didn't think the United States landed on the moon and didn't believe in the existence of Osama bin Laden. He thought all of this was all a put-up job. He's a wacko.
Christopher Hitchens
Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high.
Christopher Hitchens
Well, then what the federal government should have done was accept the assistance of foreign countries, of entrepreneurial Americans who have had solutions that they wanted presented. They can't even get a phone call returned, Bill. The Dutch—they are known, and the Norwegians—they are known for dikes and for cleaning up water and for dealing with spills. They offered to help and yet, no, they too, with the proverbial, can't even get a phone call back.
Sarah Palin
There is no such thing as notoriety in the United States these days, let alone infamy. Celebrity is all.
Christopher Hitchens
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
British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words 'Special Relationship' to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the specialness itself vanish like a phantom at cock-crow.
Christopher Hitchens
The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.
Noam Chomsky
If the system were designed to protect adoptees, why do so many have to fight for their rights?
DaShanne Stokes
Laura, this isn't love. Love lets you go on a trip without following you. Love can live without you for a week, knowing you'll come back.''No, it can't.' The afternoon shadows grew long and cold. In spite of the chill, a heat rose up inside her and flooded her face. 'That's how you know it's true love. When he can't live without you.'Karen shook her head. 'That's how you know it's obsession. Or something else.
Natalie Standiford
Sylvia Plath is there for me when actual living people upon who I have depended upon my whole life, are not. What I mean to say is, without her words, I'd be exponentially more messed up than I am already.
Arlaina Tibensky
I worry about you. You’re good with people, I’ve seen it. You like them. But there’s a limit for you.” He opened his mouth to protest but she held up her hand to silence him. “I know. You do care. But inside the framework of a project. Right now it’s your studies. Later it’ll be roads and bridges. But people around you—their lives go on outside the framework. They’re not just tools to your hand, even likable tools. Your life should go on, too. You should have more than roads to live for. Because if something does go wrong, you’ll need what you’re feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.
Kij Johnson
Lane, I will become attached to you. It happens with everyone. Something about my personality makes me latch on to people. First, it was my friend Tina, then Liam, and now you. I’m sorry, but I know it will happen. It already is happening. Now that we’ve had sex, I don’t want you out of my sight.
K. Webster
If it weren‘t for Asperger‘s and obsessions there would be no Theory of Relativity, no Magic Flute, no Microsoft…and no Ghost Busters.
Rudy Simone
The enemy was not the Klan but the inside-outside lock that racism and classism had on the minds of the people: It operated from the inside through self-hate and self-doubt, and from the outside through the police, carnivorous landlords, and the welfare system.
Junius Williams
I'm fighting now only for individual captive dolphins and dolphins in general but also for people, for the mind and sensibilities of future generations toward the world itself.
Richard O'Barry
There is nothing like the whites of someone’s eyes to convince you how very true what you believe is, how very much you must act on it.
Jennine Capo Crucet
I really admire people in the public eye, who have influence or celebrity and they take a stand on something important, bring awareness and take compassionate action.When you have been blessed with abundance or are an influencer and you bring attention to a cause, or do something to help the world, that's using your blessings for the greater good. Those are the people who inspire me.
Eileen Anglin
Don’t be a witness. Be an activist.
DaShanne Stokes
It's not an effective protest if it's not pissing people off.
John Scalzi