Quotes by American Authors - Page 105

I part my lips, but no words come out. I want to cry. Want to beg. Want to scream. But mostly, I want to hold him until I know he’s going to be okay. Then I want him to hold me until I’m okay, too.
T.L. Martin
David looked at me, then, the regret plain on his face. No matter what I said, we both knew the hard truth. We do our best. We try. And usually, it makes no difference at all
Leigh Bardugo
So don't fall in love, there's just too much to lose; if you're given the chance then I'm begging you choose to walk away, walk away, don't let it get you. I can't bear to see the same thing happen to you.
Mayday Parade
Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase "meant to be"--usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people.
Jennifer Egan
There was no other way to say it. After being heartbroken for so long, I had made myself completely numb inside. Maybe not from physical pain, but anything emotional, yes. Sexual pleasure? Numb to that, too. I’d have been a great actress. After all, I had the perfect, mind-blowing orgasm down to an art. Suppose I deserve an Oscar for that.
Jennifer Salaiz
Like I, of all people, didn't know better than to lead a total stranger to the point where they could hurt me most, knowing how easily they'd be able to find their way back to it.
Sarah Dessen
Astley comes to my side. "Are you well?" "No," I tell him, voice hoarse. "I am not well. I am broken inside. I am broken almost all-the-way deep, and I don't know...I don't know if I can ever be unbroken, let alone well again”.
Carrie Jones
Loose and forbear!
Mark Twain
Because different cultures see a particular animal as representing a certain human virtue or vice, the use of animal imagery also allows for more colorful commentary on the human condition.
Larry Herzberg
One must not be shy where language is concerned.
Ann Patchett
The language I learned was pretty, full of passivity and silence. I had no proper language for the issues of blood and anger, yet much of what went on when I was a child made me angry. There were no words a nice girl could use to describe anger; her options were to remain silent or to use indiscreet language, the kind that curls in a room like smoke and soon disappears. We girls were taught to speak safely and to bandage our anger with polite, pretty words. We might talk about the anger only in questions and sighs, unable to curse, yell or break windows in the beautiful garden.
Beth Bagley
Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop clerks and listened in on private conversations, realising I’d gone an entire month without hearing anyone complaint that they were “stressed out”.
David Sedaris
Music is the Universal Language that allows all people to communicate with each other.
Ellen J. Barrier
My people? Who are they?I went into the church where the congregationWorshiped my God. Were they my people?I felt no kinship to them as they knelt there.My people! Where are they?I went into the land where I was born,Where men spoke my language.I was a stranger there.“My people,” my soul cried. “Who are my people?”Last night in the rain I met an old manWho spoke a language I do not speak,Which marked him as one who does not know my God.With apologetic smile he offered meThe shelter of his patched umbrella.I met his eyes...And then I knew...
Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni
I should think a dead language would be rather boring, sociallyspeaking.
Sol Luckman
He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the food they've taken from tins and say no pleasantly.
Robert M. Pirsig
We believe that information is an enlightening agent, but I can assure you it is not. We consume information, but we can’t read. We forgot how to sit down and engage the dense layers of a text. We are so busy devouring information that we forgot how to dance with ideas. We confuse linguistic bits of data for knowledge and ideas. I can assure you, gentlemen, they are not the same. Ideas require effort and the kind of sensibility that engages the subtle layers of meaning. What the hell does information require?
R.F. Georgy
They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.
Donna Tartt
Language is a door. Words en-trance and are an entrance; they draw you in. When you read, the book you cradle disappears and the tales within unfold in your mind. Writing is a shelter of words and reading an interior adventure.
Laurie Seidler
Music is the language of the universe, which everyone, including all animals, can understand.
Debasish Mridha
We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads.So too often what passes for literary criticism is "I couldn't picture that guy", or "I liked that part", or "this part shouldn't have happened." That is, we've left language so far behind that sometimes we judge quality solely based on a story's actions.So we can appreciate a novel that constructs its conflicts primarily through plot - the layered ambiguity of a fatal car accident caused by a vehicle owned by Gatsby but driven by someone else, for instance. But in this image-drenched world, sometimes we struggle to appreciate and celebrate books where the quality arises not exclusively from plot but also from the language itself.
John Green
Those who mouth your sacred words with an accent you deem wrong annoy you more than those speaking something you cannot understand.
Thomm Quackenbush
There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perceptions, lines into infinity. If the poet lies about his vision he lies about himself and in himself; this produces a true barrier.
Lenore Kandel
The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.
Steven Pinker
Gankis lifted an arm to point at the distant shale cliffs. "And in the face of it there were thousands of little holes, little what-you-call-'ems...""Alcoves," Kennit supplied in an almost dreamy voice. "I call them alcoves, Gankis. As would you, if you could speak your own mother tongue.
Robin Hobb
Uh, she said maybe your eyes matched the Fog like a synchronous magnetic field?” “I don’t even know what language that is.
Joel N. Ross
I dug her usage of "Spotify" as a verb.
Kara Lee Corthron
Every problem of medicine is a problem of language, and this operation was a malapropism.
William S. Wilson
Twist a tongue, and tongue a twist how many twists can a tongue twister twist around their twisting tongue. If a tongue twister's tongue could twist, how many twists would the tongue twister's tongue twist while their tongue was a twisting.
Jazz Feylynn
She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.
Jodi Picoult
I am not sure if we are numbed to the reality of rape, but here's the sad irony. While the word rape can add an edginess to your language, talking about actual rape is taboo. I didn't know this until one of my friends was raped. Then I knew this, because I didn't want to tell anyone. If she were mugged, I would have told everyone and raged.
Christine Stockton
Twist a tongue, and tongue a twist how many twists can a tongue twister twist around the twisting tongue.
Jazz Feylynn
They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.
Zora Neale Hurston
Peace is the way, not the destination.
Shannon L. Alder
We never realize the power of real love unless we witness or experience a transaction, because real love costs.
Eric Samuel Timm
Those dear to me took fright for my safety and, perhaps, my sanity. Kings, they explained, do not walk like beggars for hundreds of miles. My response was that if a beggar could managed the feat, then why not a king? Did they think me less capable than a beggar?Sometimes I think that I am. The beggar knows much that the king can only guess. And yet who draws up the codes for begging ordinances? Often I wonder what my experience in life--my easy life following the Desolation, and my current level of comfort--has given me of any true experience to use in making laws. If we had to rely on what we knew, kings would only be of use in creating laws regarding the proper heating of tea and the cushioning of thrones.
Brandon Sanderson
Buttercup dried her tears and began to smile. She took a deep breath, heaved a sigh. It was all part of growing up. You got these little quick passions, you blinked, and they were gone. You forgave faults, found perfection, fell madly; then the next day the sun came up and it was over. Chalk it up to experience, old girl, and get on with the morning.
William Goldman
Painful experiences are like scars in our minds. Some have healed and been forgotten. Others are there as a reminder of what we have been through…
James A. Murphy
The world is full of alluring, flashy and thrilling experiences, which are illusionary traps — they are paths to nowhere.
Bryant McGill
You will find beauty in every person and experience if beauty has been cultivated within.
Bryant McGill
Wisdom is the byproduct of lifelong experience and education.
Debasish Mridha
[Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
Anaïs Nin
The four most expensive word in the English language are 'This time it's different.
John Templeton
A series of books, dilapidated and faded, sit bundled together. Most of the bindings are separating from the yellowed pages, but each is at home in its battered state. Their wrinkled pages and discolored skin tell not of old age, but of a good life. These books, unlike so many others, were not just read, but revisited, loved, and experienced.
Kelseyleigh Reber
Windows 10 could only have been a worse experience if I had paid for it!
Steven Magee
Minding his own business had been his motto living in a strange foreign country with a world-recognized social issue of failing morals.
Vann Chow
Dr. Morris believes, and I strongly agree, that couples are most likely to bond securely when they have not rushed the dating experience. Time is the critical ingredient.
James C. Dobson
It’s the journey, not the destination, but that doesn’t make sense until you get there.
J.R. Rim
Beware of anything to do with President Obama...I speak from experience.
Steven Magee
It has been my experience that law enforcement reports are littered with fabrications, inaccuracies, omissions, fraud, fantasies and willful blindness.
Steven Magee
I could have something like an encounter out there – a vicarious experience completely free of any fears of infection or the face-to-face intimacy I didn’t know how to process.
Drew Nellins Smith
NASA has decades of experience in studying the effects of Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) and their experiments show that continuous habitation of an alien environment in Space results in sickness in less than a year in astronauts and a similar environment on Earth produces ill health in humans in just two years.
Steven Magee
Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Walk the midway and hear the carnival barker.Come see the freak named after his deceased father.Come see the prince who wants to abdicate his throne.Come see the son whose name is carved on a gravestone.
Sherman Alexie
Sure, we thought the acresThat we tilled were sacred,But how could we have knownThat wheat can haunt like ghosts
Sherman Alexie
My cup is yellowOr not, though not'sImpossibleIt's yellow
Aram Saroyan
Yes, I know," Isadora said, and then read her poem, leaning forward so Carmelita Spats would not overhear:"I would rather eat a bowl of vampire batsthan spend an hour with Carmelita Spats."The Baudelaires giggled and then covered their mouths so nobody would know they were laughing at Carmelita."That was great," Klaus said. "I like the part about the bowl of bats.
Lemony Snicket
Four simple chambers.A thousand complicated doors.One of them is yours.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
Now Leroux, what think youOf this twist to the story?
E.A. Bucchianeri
The Scorpion?The Grasshopper?Which way will she go?
E.A. Bucchianeri