Quotes by American Authors - Page 23

I think no matter where you go, you'll be happy as long as you know why you're there.
Rachel Kapelke-Dale
Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most poeple who live there. If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be - that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Although my father had never been there, I came to believe I would someday see that city for him.
Alice Hoffman
My visage high above your city,Shines like gold, but half as pretty.Arms I've none, but hands I've two:Mondo, mini, black not blue.Climb my stairs and have no fears, All that threatens are my gears.Tucked beneath the mightly wheel,An envelpe shall truth reveal.
Megan Frazer Blakemore
The best thing to be in a city was anonymous. Failing that, however, notoriety would do.
Michael Swanwick
All night, snow.Open the window,stretch my arms out.Keep my eyes openin the white, whipping wind.There are few cars on the highway.The river's frozen in places.In a city that never stops,I can hardly hear anything.For tonight, the city gives mewhat I need.
Cordelia Jensen
I will not see you, she tells the city, but I will remember you.
Robert Jackson Bennett
When I come back to you, if I come back to you, will I know you? Will you be the city of my memory? Or will you be a stranger?
Robert Jackson Bennett
It's a strange city... filled with things that are not obvious.
A.M. Homes
You cannot defend your design without knowing what you're designing for.
I.M. Pei
Let's do it right. This is for the ages.
I.M. Pei
I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.
Jesse Jackson
He needed to get away from the rush of the city, from the unceasing noise and annoying obligations.
Francine Rivers
Life is architecture and architecture is the mirror of life.
I.M. Pei
It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract.
I.M. Pei
She knows she is in Chicago. But she does not yet realize that she is in Illinois.
Lydia Davis
There are times when Los Angeles is the most magical city on Earth. When the Santa Ana winds sweep through and the air is warm and so, so clear. When the jacaranda trees bloom in the most brilliant lilac violet. When the ocean sparkles on a warm February day and you're pushing fine grains of sand through your bare toes while the rest of the country is hunkered down under blankets slurping soup. But other times, like when the jacaranda trees drop their blossoms in an eerie purple rain, Los Angeles feels like only a half-formed dream. Like perhaps the city was founded as a strip mall in the early 1970s and has no real reason to exist. An afterthought from the designer of some other, better city. A playground made only for attractive people to eat expensive salads.
Steven Rowley
I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, waling the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.
Donna Tartt
The San Francisco skyline sparkles in the distance, the bay spread out before it like a shark-infested welcome mat.
T.T. Monday
To love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be destroyed
Cassandra Clare
Streets that follow like a tedious argumentOf insidious intentTo lead you to an overwhelming question...
T.S Eliot
As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed.Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what’s left to smoke. The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows.
Jardine Libaire
How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams With its illusions aspirations dreams! Book of Beginnings Story without End Each maid a heroine and each man a friend!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Youth comes but once in a lifetime.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Reckless youth makes rueful age.
Benjamin Franklin
It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own it simply erases your own experience in history.
Renata Adler
Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations he's only trying on one face after another till he finds his own.
Logan Pearsall Smith
The youth gets together this material to build a bridge to the moon or perchance a palace or temple on earth and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
Henry David Thoreau
The interests of childhood and youth are the interests of mankind.
Edmund Storer James
Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms tastes and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.
John Jay Chapman
I do beseech you to direct your efforts more to preparing youth for the path and less to preparing the path for the youth.
Ben Lindsey
One boy's a boy two boys are half a boy three boys are no boy at all.
Charles A. Lindbergh
The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
Quentin Crisp
It is not possible for civilization to flow backward while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong but it will advance its allotted length.
Helen Keller
The 'teenager' seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg
To keep clear of concealment to keep clear of the need of concealment to do nothing that he might not do out on the middle of Boston Common at noonday -I cannot say how more and more that seems to me to be the glory of a young man's life. It is an awful hour when the first necessity of hiding anything comes. The whole life is different thenceforth. When there are questions to be feared and eyes to be avoided and subjects that must not be touched then the bloom of life is gone. Put off that day as long as possible. Put if off forever if you can.
Phillips Brooks
I am constantly amazed when I talk to young people to learn how much they know about sex and how little about soap.
Billie Burke
Only the young die good.
Oliver Herford
When I was younger I could remember anything whether it had happened or not.
Mark Twain
It is essential that we enable young people to see themselves as participants in one of the most exciting eras in history and to have a sense of purpose in relation to it.
Nelson Rockefeller
When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain
The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded upon a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts and we grow happier as we grow older.
William Lyon Phelps
Whom the gods love die young no matter how long they live.
Elbert Hubbard
When a man of 40 falls in love with a girl of 20 it isn't her youth he is seeking but his own.
Lenore Coffee
Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.
Herbert Hoover
Truth forever on the scaffold wrong forever on the throne.
James Russell Lowell
A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.
Thomas Paine
Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.
Elbert Hubbard
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
Norman Mailer
How can you write if you can't cry?
Ring Lardner
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Laurence Clark Powell
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.
T.S Eliot
The editorial job has become unlike the ancient age when one judged what one read a job of making judgements on outlines ideas reputations previous books scenarios treatments talk and promises.
Sam Vaughan
On the trail of another man the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.
Paul Murray Kendall
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution once revealed must seem to be inevitable.
Raymond Chandler
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers dear Readers are an afterthought.
Gertrude Stein
A memorandum is written to protect the writer - not to inform his reader.
Dean Acheson