Quotes by American Authors - Page 20

If you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe - to see you, and to give a fuck - you've already blown it.
Neal Stephenson
Being tame is what we're taught: ... put the crayons back, stay in line, don't talk too loud, keep your knees together, nice girls don't...As you might know, nice girls DO, and they like to feel wild and alive. Being tame feels safe, being wild, unsafe. Yet safety is an illusion anyway. We are not in control. No matter how dry and tame and nice we live, we will die. And we will suffer along the way. Living wild is its own reward.
S.A.R.K.
Gracie, you are exactly where you are supposed to be and everything is going to be all right.Willem
Lisa C. Temple
Many of the signals that either stoke or diminish female desire have to do with the female brain's question: Is it safe here?
Naomi Wolf
Safety is largely an illusion, and panic knows this.
Rita Zoey Chin
Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste.
Rachel Kushner
A wise woman protects her kids. A wiser woman hangs out with police officers, retired FBI agents and private investigators.
Shannon L. Alder
He wraps his arms around me and holds me tight for a few seconds. Hisbreaths tickle my ear, and I close my eyes, letting myself finally relax. Hesmells like wind and sweat and soap, like Tobias and like safety.
Veronica Roth
Where everyone knows your name, and a safe place to raise a family.
Terri Haynes Roach
He smells safe, too, like sunlit walks in the orchard and silent breakfastsin the dining hall. And in the moments before I drift off to sleep, I almost forget about our war-torn city and all the conflict that willcome to find us soon, if we don’t find it first.
Veronica Roth
When Iran starts to regulate USA nuclear facilities, it will be a step in the right direction for the safety and security of 300 million people.
Steven Magee
During my five years on Mauna Kea, workers routinely displayed the symptoms of Cerebral Hypoxia
Steven Magee
Doesn't it give you a supernatural and ultimate feeling of assurance, comfort, safety and security to know that wherever you go God is there with you? He is your Peace, Shield and Strength! He loves you! His love is eternal!
Pazaria Smith
I smile to catch the piranhas from swimming out of my mouth.
Evan Mariah Pettit
Whenever he can, Werner records what the partisans say on magnetic tape. Everybody, he is learning, likes to hear themselves talk. Hubris, like the oldest stories. They raise the antenna too high, broadcast for too many minutes, assume the world offers safety and rationality when of course it does not.
Anthony Doerr
Easy, dushka," he mumured. "You're safe.
Apryl Baker
The FDA just ordered them off the market. The glaze is supposed to be poison—provided you drink at least forty cups of tea out of one of them every day of your life for twenty years.
Frederik Pohl
When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat
Bell Hooks
The best way to stay safe is, let them think your insane.
Anthony Liccione
I'm safer with the Tailor and Pretty Will and every thief and cutthroat in the bend than I am with Miss Josephine Montfort of Gramecy Park.
Jennifer Donnelly
If either one of you is ever in a situation you’re not entirely comfortable with—call me. I don’t care what time it is. I don’t care who is there or what is going on. You call me and I will come get you.
Mindy McGinnis
Our “protective bubbles”—our houses, our cars, our friends, our online identities—might make us feel secure, but most of it’s just an illusion. It’s easy to get hurt, just like it’s easy to hurt other people.
Paula Stokes
Even if it means I’ll never be the man you give yourself to, I’ll always do anything to protect you.
Parker S. Huntington
Safety is an illusion and perhaps it's better to challenge it sometimes, to see how far we can go, to learn about the stuff we are made of.
Tania Aebi
The most basic bit of advice given to women who have to walk alone at night is, ‘Look alert. Be aware of your surroundings and walk briskly. You will be safer if you know where you are going, and if anyone who observes you senses that.’ The stalking, predatory animal cuts the weakest from the pack, and then kills at his leisure.
Ann Rule
Risk is the increased consequence of failure.
Michael Bane
How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!
William Dean Howells
When what we believe we’ve mastered is no longer predictable we’re not fine. The world suddenly is a very scary place. It loses its charm.
Patricia Cornwell
Stay the night, said the officer, patting a confiscated couch. I'll keep my hands off you. I promise.You have more than hands, said Elie.My feet are safe, too, said the officer. He pointed to a hole in his boots, and they laughed.
Thaisa Frank
Safety tip. When you see smoke run, never wait for fire.
Danielle Sibarium
Actually, [Wax] said, we came here because we needed someplace safe to think for a few hours."Ranette: "Your mansion isn't safe?"Wax: "My butler failed to poison me, then tried to shoot me, then set off an explosive in my study"Ranette: "Huh.... You need to screen these people better, Wax.
Brandon Sanderson
It was the kind of terrified look that reminds you that no matter how rational or grown up a person might seem, some part of him is absolutely sure - knows - that an evil other-world exists just outside of our regular, everyday world. And that although we don't expect that world to collide with our calm, predictable one...well, really, at any moment that is exactly what might happen.
Ann M. Martin
A woman who goes around wearing a knife is obviously looking for trouble." She reached deep into her pocket and brought out a long, slender piece of metal, glittering all along one edge. "However a woman who carries a knife is ready for trouble. Generally speaking, it's easier to appear harmless. It's less trouble all around.
Patrick Rothfuss
I had come to discover that "safe" was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let's-pretend, monsters and nightmares lay, and that not all of them came from places like the moonroads or the nightling cities. Some of the monsters were people we knew. People we thought we could trust.
Holly Lisle
Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.
Ed Viesturs
Valek coalesced from the shadows and wrapped me in his long lean arms. I soaked in his musky smell, listening to his heart beat. Strong and steady. No indication that he had been sneaking around.
Maria V. Snyder
I knew it was a day of endings, one way or another.
Chris Howard
Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tell all the truth but tell it slant.
Emily Dickinson
I’m a man of music as much as I am a man of words and prose. One could even possibly say that they, music and prose, are connected to a lengthy and mutually beneficial extent and that they have been of centuries or millenniums.
Nicholas Trandahl
The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.
Constance Hale
You take what you can get, I reckon. You take what you can get.
Chris Howard
You couldn't make up something that looked so right.
Chris Howard
I felt naked beneath the wildness of her eyes. I felt alive. Unknown. And I knew then that the world contained so many things I would never understand.
Chris Howard
why be bothered with other people's set-ups? it only leads to torture.
Bob Dylan
And I howled at that swarm and the crops and the sky, and the stars should have quit because there weren't no reason to be shining.
Chris Howard
In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.
William H. Gass
Because even when there is no hope, somehow you can still find a place to pin inside the things that you need.
Chris Howard
Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s—all of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics—in practice—even if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas—they remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other’s grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don’t Ask, 'giving prizes to friends.
Sesshu Foster
A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.
Rachel Kushner
There were these things and the flames ate these things, and since fire doesn't distinguish between the word of God and the word of the Soviet Communications Registry Bureau, both Qur'an and telephone directory returned to His mouth in the same inhalation of smoke.
Anthony Marra
The joyous clamor in my mind drowned out the strange sound outside the car: a humming noise that was gathering speed and growing louder, a roar that was not the waves curling up the beach.
Padma Venkatraman
What did Saturday's used to taste like? Like eggs and fried ham and the bitter smell of hair in heavy rollers. Like long quiet hours and making up after a fight. Like ointment and bruising. Like waiting, especially, for something - anything - to happen.
Lauren Oliver
Victor was the first to speak, and when he did, it was with an eloquence and composure perfectly befitting the situation
V.E. Schwab
It ain't so easy writing about nothin
Patti Smith
She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind.
Toni Morrison
In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer.
Joseph Brodsky
Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child's swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep.
Peter Heller
And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider’s web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. She accompanied him: her little boots stepped rapidly, and her hands never stopped moving, moving—to pluck a leaf from a bush or stroke a rock wall in passing—light, laughing hands that knew no repose. He saw her small face with its dense dark freckles, and her wide eyes, whose pale greenish hue was that of the shards of glass licked smooth by the sea waves.
Vladimir Nabokov
Iverson glanced down at my white-knuckled grip, then at my eyes. A hint of a smile more subtle than a single flick of snow crossed his face, and his eyes nodded approval.
Allen Eskins