Quotes by American Authors - Page 2

Is that the end... of all the races and civilizations, and the dreams of the world, to be able to leave a few stones buried beneath the sands, to tell the Dark that we were here?
C.J. Cherryh
What is about to happen is not the reclaiming of Earth by a triumphant Mother Nature, a karmic repudiation of humanity's arrogant ill stewardship. Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man's planet, for the whole scope of our history, coming regardless of what we did or didn't do.
Ben H. Winters
It's an alien apocalypse! Quick, grab the beer!
Rick Yancey
The way we live our lives is not sustainable. I don’t just mean recycling and turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth. I mean the way we treat each other. The way we pick and choose whose lives are important – who we actually treat as human. There is nobody on this earth whose life is not of value. And that includes those of us who have been left behind. Maybe they did go to some Christian heaven. But what I’m saying is, we’re good people too. We’re worthwhile people. I’d vouch for every last one of you.
Katie Coyle
The Agora had fallen, too.tVince turned the radio off, dismissing what they'd just heard, and merged onto I-87. A little shriek of madness sounded in the back of his brain, but he said, with admirable calm considering, "Seriously, love, I think we've got this.
Erin Kellison
What’s the goal?” asked Carlos. “I’m glad you asked,” said Harry. You – all of you – and I – we’re going to save the world.
Kenneth Eade
Just two naked guys enjoying a manly hug in the middle of the apocalypse. - Cody Forester, Werewolf Apocalypse
Roxanne Smolen
It was like the beginning of the end of the world.
Kenneth Eade
Three of them, dressed in silvery gray, on three horses—one black, one white, and the third red.
Holly Black
Just in case the world ends tomorrow, we might as well enjoy today.
Susan Beth Pfeffer
In the early days, it was nearly omnipresent, a constant background noise, like the hum of traffic on a busy highway: the sound of a human being in pain.
Rick Yancey
You’re a tough guy, but I’m a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse.
James S.A. Corey
Ten thousand years to build civilization, ten months to tear it down, and each day lasted ten times longer than the one before, and the nights lasted ten times as long as the days. The only thing more excruciating than the boredom of those hours was the terror of knowing that any minute they could end.
Rick Yancey
He looked at the sky once more. Men had gone out there, he thought in wonder, and couldn't think why. Singly and in small groups they had gone into strange lands, across wide seas, had climbed mountains where no human foot had ever trod. And he couldn't think why they had done these things. What impulse had driven them from their own kind to perish alone, or among strangers.
Kate Wilhelm
He went to make coffee. Because when you have just heard about the possible transformation of the human race into feral monsters you need to be doing something with your hands and creating something hot and comforting for another person.
Charlie Jane Anders
In the first couple of weeks there were big piles of trash outside every house. All the stuff you couldn’t find another use for and couldn’t compost. Yogurt cups, torn trash bags, dirty diapers, hair-spray cans, paper towels. Sometimes you’d see a pile that was as high as your waist. Nathan said it was a purge, a cleanse. But you could just as well say that who we were went out with the empties. We will never get our selves back.
Jess Row
Will the last person on the planet please turn off the lights?
John Joseph Adams
Country’s friggin’ dying, man, you have to triage the motherfucker.
Jess Row
I never understood why people from the 1980s thought there would be flying cars. It just seemed really dangerous and impractical to me, but they all talked about it, so it must have been a thing. Meanwhile, my dream for the future was that it wouldn't involve mass extinction and large-scale water shortages and cannibalism.
Dan Chaon
You can’t let the apocalypse rule your life.
Michelle Tea
Every day is a lie, he said. But you are dying. That is not a lie.
Cormac McCarthy
When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tiananmen Square, the Potala Palace, the Great Pyramids, the Wailing Wall. After sampling all of them she locked her radio dial on Notre Dame, where they were holding the Vigil for the End of the World and would continue doing so until the cathedral fell down in ruins upon the performers’ heads and extinguished all life in the remains of the building. She couldn’t watch it, since video bandwidth was scarce, but she could imagine it well: the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, its ranks swollen by the most prestigious musicians of the Francophone world, all dressed in white tie and tails, ball gowns and tiaras, performing in shifts around the clock, playing a few secular classics but emphasizing the sacred repertoire: masses and requiems. The music was marred by the occasional thud, which she took to be the sonic booms of incoming bolides. In most cases the musicians played right through. Sometimes a singer would skip a beat. An especially big boom produced screams and howls of dismay from the audience, blended with the clank and clatter of shattered stained glass raining to the cathedral’s stone floor. But for the most part the music played sweetly, until it didn’t. Then there was nothing.
Neal Stephenson
For Alwyn's grandfather, who was known as "the greatest talker in the country," used words which no one else understood, words which he did not understand, and words which do not exist, to swell a passionate theme, to confound his neighbors in an argument, and for their own sake. He would say, for example, "My farm was the very apocalypse of fertility, but the renter has rested on his oars till it is good for nothing," or "Manifest the bounty to pass the salt shaker in my direction." Something of the Bible, something of an Irish inheritance, something of a liar's anxiety, made of his most ordinary remark a strange and wearisome oratory.
Glenway Wescott
God, you mean I lost my virginity to the apocalypse?"Morgan sighed again. "The whole thing was really embarrassing; my parents sent me to Brooklyn when they found out." She shrugged. "I thought I’d be safe in a gay bar, okay? What were you doing in there anyway?"Lace looked at me sidelong. "You were where?"I took a sip of beer, swallowed it. "I, uh, hadn’t been in the city...very long. I didn’t know.
Scott Westerfeld
The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.
Tod Wodicka
Thank God for imminent doomsday.
Jim Butcher
Sometimes it's torturous to think of things we can't possibly have.
Aaron B. Powell
The last to fall were the buildings, distant and solemn, the gravestones for an entire world.
Dan Wells
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across the surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.
Mark Lawrence
I love my virginity to the apocalypse.
Scott Westerfeld
When I cry - when I let myself cry - that's who I cry for. I don't cry for myself. I cry for the Cassie that's gone.And I wonder what that Cassie would think of me.The Cassie who kills.
Rick Yancey
To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
A good word will spread in the grapevine, bringing forth clusters of grapes and the benevolent of wine; a bad word will spread withering the vines, and choke the potential grapes.
Anthony Liccione
Did you ever hear the Oriental proverb, "The dogs bark but the caravan passes on"? Let them bark, Scarlett. I fear nothing will stop your caravan.
Margaret Mitchell
When they're talking about me they're letting someone else rest.
Debra Webb
Oh! Did you hear that Haley Spencer asked him to homecoming?” she exclaimed. “Of course I didn’t. You’re my source of gossip, remember?
Rebecca Donovan
Count Olaf sounds like an awful person. I hope he is torn apart by wild animals someday. Wouldn't that be satisfying?
Lemony Snicket
A peaceful refuge in which to rediscover each other, we thought,, not realizing that, while golf and fishing are Scotland's most popular outdoor sports, gossip is the most popular indoor sport.
Diana Gabaldon
You're not playing the game," he said grimly. "English gossip isn't supposed to get back to the person it's about.
Elaine Dundy
It was uncertain. She was in her early forties. Breast cancer. No one could identify exactly how everyone had come to know this fact. Was it a fact? Some people called it rumor. But in fact there was no such thing as rumor. There was fact, and there was what did not come up in conversation.
Joshua Ferris
You really love to gossip, don't you?” he asked, wishing she had brought him a glass of wine.“Yes, I suppose I do,” she answered, sounding surprised at the realization. “You think that's why I love reading novels so much?
Donna Leon
Don't talk about the problem. Be a part of the solution.
Chris Vonada
Truth is not exciting enough to those who depend on the characters and lives of their neighbors for all their amusement
George Bancroft
Worse than talking with a mouthful, is gossiping with a mouthful!
Anthony Liccione
I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
Joyce Carol Oates
Maybe taming my tongue will be good for me in the end. But it's pretty hard when you've got a world filled with idiots from Drunkopolis.
A.J. Jacobs
The recitation of grievances was strange balm.
Regina O'Melveny
There is one more thing," said Mr. Peabody. "Now you must go and pick up all the feathers." ... "I don't think it's possible to pick up all the feathers," Tommy replied. "It would be just as impossible to undo the damage that you have done by spreading the rumor that I am a thief," said Mr. Peabody. "Each feather represents a person in Happyville." ... "Next time, don't be so quick to judge a person. And remember the power of your words.
Madonna
Gossip never goes away, no matter where you are in life.
Miranda Kenneally
Everybody's always doing the same old things--- you know, doing unto others before they can do unto you.
Michael Lee West
It was only too bad that to gossip and support mean ideas was easier and more enjoyable, really, than to keep quiet and know in silence that the true story can never be told, articulated in a way that will tell the whole truth. Even if it is better to be quiet, quietness will never reign. People talked, even the best of them.
Amanda Coplin
In Russia everything is a secret, but there is no secrecy.
Robert K. Massie
It's a strange thing, to be talked about instead of talked to.
Maggie Stiefvater
If talk is cheap, then being silent is expensive. And many people it seems, can't afford to buy into it.
Anthony Liccione
A knife wound heals, but a tongue wound festers.
Ella Leya
there are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself.
Jonathan Franzen
Don't pretend like you know me 'cause you shook some neighborhood tree and got a li'l rotten fruit.
Lauren Francis-Sharma
Let them say what they wish behind your back. You need only be strong enough that they don't say it to your face.
Courtney Milan
There was a moment of silence and then Sutherland breathed, “But, darling! Gossip is the food of the gods.
Andrew Holleran
Whoever gossips to you will gossip of you"; "It is easier to be critical than correct"- avoid criticism about other officers, and never vent destructive criticism of your service, your unit, or your superiors.
Kenneth W. Estes