Quotes by American Authors - Page 22

You clumsy wench—Gods above! Are you trying to rob me, girl?” The nobleman seizes my wrist and yanks it from his pocket. My hand comes up with the pipe clenched in it. I stare at him, horrified.“I . . .”“I’ll have your head for this!” the man rages. “I’ll have you whipped!”***“I got the pipe,” I say, holding it up.He stares for a minute, blinking, and then bursts into laughter. A few curious deer stick their heads through the shrubs to see what the racket is. Aladdin doubles over, laughing loud enough to startle birds from the trees overhead, and after a moment, I start laughing too. I haven’t laughed this hard in a long, long while, and it feels wonderful. We sit on the grass and laugh until our faces are red and we’re out of breath.“You are the worst thief I have ever seen,” declares Aladdin.“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I got it, didn’t I?”“My grandmother could pick pockets better than that! Though that’s not quite fair; my grandmother was the best pickpocket in Parthenia. She taught me all her tricks. Drove my mother crazy.
Jessica Khoury
If you're going to look back on something and laugh about it, you might as well laugh about it now...Things are almost never as bad as they first seem. Loosen up, girlfriend... you could giggle more in real life.
James Patterson
I loved laughing with him, loved that he could make me laugh.
James Patterson
I finally made eye contact with the boy in the bed. He lay on his side, a tube in his nose and another in his vein. His cheeks were sunken, and his skin was ghostly pale. His hair might have been blond, but it was fading into a gray, making it hard to tell. The only part of this boy that held any life at all were his eyes, which brimmed with tears when he saw me.“Kahlen?”I sat still. These three people all called me by the same name, which sounded sort of like Katlyn and Ellen and made me believe that maybe they actually knew me.“Where did you go? Where have you been? I thought you were dead.” His chest worked overtime, trying to keep up with his mouth, spilling over with words.“Can you get her a pen? Please?” He lifted an arm weakly. It was all bone. “I just need to know.”“A pen?” I asked.Once again his eyes lit up.“You can talk?”I stared at this boy, at how he was overjoyed at one of the most basic things a person could do. “So it would seem.” I smiled.He flopped onto his back, laughing from his gut, and based on Julie’s tears, I was guessing she’d been waiting a long time for that to come back.
Kiera Cass
I didn't think he'd go back for him. But it shouldn't surprise me, either, I guess . . . given their relationship. I'm extremely curious where they're hiding him, as he doesn't blend. At all. Ever. I can't imagine where they could put him that he wouldn't attract a lot of attention . . . in either form." Xev"Well, aren't we Mr. Dark and Cryptic . . . shall we call him?" Nick pulls out his phone."I doubt he knows how to work that. I'm sure he'd sniff it and eat it if you gave him one. Do you know where they're keeping him?" Xev"You know how akri-Caleb's house is up off the ground and gots all that room under it for storage?" Simi"Oh dear Gods, he's in my wine cellar? Seriously? I'm thinking I should have made amends with my brother sooner and moved him into my house to watch the puca. What kind of mutant life form do I have living in my cellar? And do I need to fumigate my house?"" Caleb
Sherrilyn Kenyon
You know you've reached a very sad place when the only person who can make you laugh is yourself.
Rick Yancey
September laughed and her laugh sounded like a roar; as if she had never been able to properly laugh in her whole life, only giggle or chuckle or grin, and now that she could do it right, now that her laughing had grown up and put bells on, it had become the most boisterous, rowdy roar you ever heard.
Catherynne M. Valente
Did you do this?”“There are other ways to beat someone than with fists.” Radu poked her in the side with a finger.She surprised him by laughing. He stood up straighter, a proud grin at having surprised and delighted Lada bursting across his face. She never laughed unless she was laughing at him. He had done something right!Then the lashings began.Radu’s smile wilted and died. He looked away. He was safe now. And Lada was proud of him, which had never happened before. He focused on that to ignore the sick feelings twisting his stomach as Aron and Andrei cried out in pain. He wanted his nurse—wanted her to hold and comfort him—and this, too, made him feel ashamed.Lada watched the whip with a calculating look. “Still,” she said. “Fists are faster.
Kiersten White
I learned a long time ago that you have to be able to laugh no matter what. Otherwise you start weeping and never stop.
Catherine Jones Payne
It's a powerful experience, shitting. There's something magical about it, profound even. I think God made humans shit in the way we do because it brings us back down to earth and gives us humility. I don't care who you are, we all shit the same. Beyonce shits. The pope shits. The Queen of England shits. When we shit we forget our airs and our graces, we forget how famous or how rich we are. All of that goes away. You are never more yourself than when you're taking a shit. You have that moment where you realize, 'This is me. This is who I am.
Trevor Noah
When you can laugh about something, you know it is healed.
Alan Cohen
I can't think I had much of a sense of humor as long as I remained the only child. When my brother Edward came along we both became comics, making each other laugh.
Eudora Welty
You got to laugh Tree, if you don't you'll cry.
Joan Bauer
Laugh soon because you never know how soon it will be too late
Thomas F. Shubnell
James started to laugh. His chin hurt where she'd smacked him twice, his foot throbbed where she'd stepped on it, and his entire body felt as if he'd swum through a rosebush, which wasn't as far off the truth as it sounded. Yet still he started to laugh.
Julia Quinn
... sometimes in life, you either laugh or you cry. And I prefer to laugh.
Jim Stovall
At some point, I had to start laughing, because I was all wrung out from crying.
Julie Metz
And Peter laughed, and when he did, all the Devils grinned, because Peter's laugh was a most contagious thing.
Brom
It's in the tension that the music is made.
Rebekah Lyons
I know what you're doing, though.""I'm glad somebody knows what I'm about, because I seem to have lost my own grasp of it entirely.
Grace Burrowes
Nobody really knows what I am,” Nyx said. “Not until I put a bullet in their head.
Kameron Hurley
I know not the way He leads me, but well do I know my Guide.
Henrietta C. Mears
Because until you know what you want to be, other people are just going to keep trying to make you into something useful for them.
Kameron Hurley
Sometimes you know when someone is telling you the truth.
Todd Strasser
God, how I hate the fact that I know this stuff. It only proves that it is possible to learn by osmosis.
Natalie Blitt
We don't even know how to rest anymore.
Craig Groeschel
Anna, you miss him.” “All the time. I still can’t believe he’s gone.” The words come out in a whoosh, tasting funny in my mouth. No matter how many times I say them, they still feel like a garbled, impossible language. My chest hurts, and I have to hold my breath to keep from inhaling a deep sob. “He was more than your best friend.” I nod absently, forgetting myself for a moment, forgetting that I’m talking to Jayne and not my journal. “I – I mean, he was like a brother to me. You know, like Frankie. Well, she’s the sister. I mean–” Jayne reaches for my hands across the table, shaking her head softly. “Sweetheart, when you say Matt’s name, you have the same look in your eyes that he’d get whenever he’d say yours.
Sarah Ockler
We should know who they are," I said, "before we kill them. That's just being polite.
Bernard Cornwell
If we're honest with ourselves, most of us know the one thing we lack.
Craig Groeschel
What matters is the one thing I do know for certain: God is with me.
Craig Groeschel
There wasn't in the beginning. It wasn't until your kind discovered what was happening that any resistance started. That seems to be the key—knowing what’s going to happen.
Stephenie Meyer
One thing I've learned: you never know where life is taking you, but it's taking you.
Hilary Swank
We do not kiss. We do nothing but hold on and breathe, but still I know. I cannot go gently now. Not even for the sake of my parents, my family.Not even for Xander.
Ally Condie
A scientist doesn't know all the answers. Nobody does, not even teachers. But a scientist keeps on trying to find the answers.
Oliver Butterworth
Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.
Raymond Carver
The biggest enemies we have to overcome on the road to success are not lack of ability and lack of opportunity but fears of failure and rejection and the doubts that they trigger.
Brian Tracy
Unprocessed intense emotion goes underground and creates a subconscious block that can be released as soon as the original event is integrated in the mind, heart, and body.
Deborah Sandella
Sometimes emotion is gentle, like rain feeding the river to nourish life, but sometimes it explodes like a rainstorm whose floodwaters wipe out bridges and homes.
Deborah Sandella
What you feel is what you get, regardless of what you think!
Deborah Sandella
The ride had begun.The theatre and club spectaculars seemed to stick up into the sky at all sorts of crazy angles, probably because most of them were planted diagonally on rooftops. Follow Thru, Whoopee, Show Boat, El Fay Club, Club Richman, Texas Guinan's. It gave the town the appearance of standing on its ear. ("The Number's Up")
Cornell Woolrich
This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor.
Donald Barthelme
You know," he said, his voice making me feel cold in spite of the heat, "this city can get ahold of you and pull you back no matter how hard you try to climb out. Like a grave.
Neal Shusterman
The brown book I carry says there is nothing stranger than to explore a city wholly different from all those one knows, since to do so is to explore a second and unsuspected self. I have found a thing stranger: to explore such a city only after one has lived in it for some time without learning anything of it.
Gene Wolfe
I belong here, I tell Toy. I'm hungry for every city block. Every brick building. Every crowded intersection. Electric. I feel brand new.
Erica Lorraine Scheidt
Chicago does not go to the world, the world comes to Chicago! Who needs New York? Who has taller buildings than our tall buildings? Who's got a busier airport than our airport? You want Picasso? We got Picasso, big Picasso. Nobody can make heads or tails of it. It's a lion? No, a seahorse. Looks to me like a radiator with wings. Who gives a damn, people, a Picasso's a Picasso.
Peter Orner
In New York there is always something to look at, but it is all infinitely more interesting through a window in the backseat of a limousine.
Anna Godbersen
I'm in love with New York. It matches my mood. I'm not overwhelmed. It is the suitable scene for my ever ever heightened life. I love the proportions, the amplitude, the brilliance, the polish, the solidity. I look up at Radio City insolently and love it. It's all great, and Babylonian. Broadway at night. Cellophane. The newness. The vitality. True, it is only physical. But it's inspiring. Just bring your own contents, and you create a sparkle of the highest power. I'm not moved, not speechless. I stand straight, tough and I meet the impact. I feel the glow and the dancing in everything. The radio music in the taxis, scientific magic, which can all be used lyrically. That's my last word. Give New York to a poet. He can use it. It can be poetized. Or maybe that's mania of mine, to poetize. I live lightly, smoothly, actively, ears or eyes wide open, alert, oiled! I feel the glow and the dancing in every thing and the tempo is like that of my blood. I'm at once beyond, over and in New York, tasting it fully.
Anaïs Nin
For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;And men are whithered before their primeBy the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed, In the smothering reek of mill and mine;And death stalks in on the struggling crowd—But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine
George Washington Sears
A city finds its life through the humans who inhabit it. When they go, what is truly left? Just silent stones, witnesses to the history but mute in its telling, remaining thus while slowly turning to rubble. It saddens me that life’s moments are thus lost, that one cannot experience the past in the same rich vibrancy as the present. You live the moments and then relegate them to memory, now just two-dimensional shadows, pictures without depth, stripped of their purest emotion, their tactile connections no longer accessible. You try to recall, but can bring back only a fraction of the event lived. The rest is gone, never to be as full and complete as it was in that one place at that one time. That was what I thought as I studied these stone remains; that all the tangible things experienced here abide somewhere in time, but can never again be wholly re-animated, now just ghosts imbedded in the crumbling walls and in the fading memories of those who once lived here.
Michael Puttonen
He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish.
John Vaillant
What are you thinking?” he asked in a disarmingly gentle tone.“That the city looks different depending on whom I’m seeing it with.”He nodded easily, as if this same thought had occurred to him. “I notice different things,” I continued. “Like with you, I pay more attention to the details of the buildings – the textures, the colors, the people standing in front of them. The reflections are different.”“Reflections?” he asked quietly.“They are.” I watched our bodies morph and distort in the window of an empty bank. “You’re there,” I said. “That’s how they’re different.
Jessica Hawkins
Ah, what sights and sounds and pain lie beneath that mist. And we had thought that our hard climb out of that cruel valley led to some cool, green and peaceful, sunlit place---but it's all jungle here, a wild and savage wilderness that's overrun with ruins. But put on your crown, my Queen, and we will build a New City on these ruins.
Eldridge Cleaver
New York had saved him, in a very real way. It had pushed and prodded him with its impatient and sharp fingers, reminding him on a daily basis during that jittery first year that it didn't really give a goddamn whether he sank or swam. He liked its selfishness and its generosity and its propensity for flipping the bird to the rest of the world.
Nora Roberts
There seems to be a different Chicago around every street corner, behind every bar, and within every apartment, two-flat, cottage, or bungalow. City of immigrants or city of heartless plutocrats, say what you will, Chicago almost defies interpretation. In many ways Chicago is like a snake that sheds its skin every thirty years or so and puts on a new coat to conform to a new reality.
Dominic A. Pacyga
A man should never wear shorts in the city. Flip-flops and shorts in the city are never appropriate. Shorts should only be worn on the tennis court or on the beach.
Tom Ford
I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city.
Chaim Potok
What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?
Rabih Alameddine
This is what I’ve always loved about a city, all the worlds hidden away inside, largest of aquariums.
David Vann
The silhouettes of Lovat now dominated the skyline. Nine levels stretching skyward. Five hundred meters high at its apex. Each level housing buildings of various sizes sagged on the backs of buildings below. Thousands of sodium lamps twinkled in their recesses.Lovat was the oldest and largest city on the coast, and it showed its age by the haphazard mess it had become. Roads rose and dipped, elevators and staircases criss-crossed, and floors would end and then begin across the city leaving large empty spaces between levels.
K.M. Alexander
And when spring comes to the City people notice one another in the road; notice the strangers with whom they share aisles and tables and the space where intimate garments are laundered. going in and out, in and out the same door, they handle the handle; on trolleys and park benches they settle thighs on a seat in which hundreds have done it too. Copper coins dropped in the palm have been swallowed by children and tested by gypsies, but it’s still money and people smile at that. It’s the time of year when the City urges contradiction most, encouraging you to buy street food when you have no appetite at all; giving you a taste for a single room occupied by you alone as well as a craving to share it with someone you passed in the street. Really there is no contradiction—rather it’s a condition; the range of what an artful City can do. What can beat bricks warming up to the sun? The return of awnings. The removal of blankets from horses’ backs. Tar softens under the heel and the darkness under bridges changes from gloom to cooling shade. After a light rain, when the leaves have come, tree limbs are like wet fingers playing in woolly green hair. Motor cars become black jet boxes gliding behind hoodlights weakened by mist. On sidewalks turned to satin figures move shoulder first, the crowns of their heads angled shields against the light buckshot that the raindrops are. The faces of children glimpsed at windows appear to be crying, but it is the glass pane dripping that makes it seem so.
Toni Morrison