Quotes by American Authors - Page 233

His voice is muddy, that's what it is. Dark and brown and muddy. A note to it like coffee left too long on the burner. And unsweetened, bitter chocolate. But there's dirt in it too, deep, dark dirt, like the garden in October.
Jael McHenry
...what really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude: the attitude of your prose toward out elusive friend the Reader and the role you invent for that invented being in your invented world.
Stephen Koch
He said that things could be different in Little Rock, if only the right people could find their voice. I wanted to be on of those people.
Kristin Levine
His voice is so low I can feel it brushing my waist.
Chelsea Fine
A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings.
Kahlil Gibran
In the last analysis, be always of whatever truth you would live.For fire flames but in the heart of a colder fire.All voice is but echo caught from a soundless voice.Height is not deprivation of valley, nor defect of desire,But defines, for the fortunate, that joy in which all joys should rejoice.
Robert Penn Warren
Speaking and listening are a form of psychic breathing.
Carol Gilligan
Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in a concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us. Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds. Once released, they may never return. If they do, they have chosen home and the bird-worms are calmed into an ars poetica.
Terry Tempest Williams
A pencil is a wand and a weapon. Be careful. Protect yourself. It can be glorious.
Terry Tempest Williams
Surely she'd heard voices like his, so low-pitched as to make every commonplace utterance seem of the deepest intimacy, every cliche a delicious secret.
Loretta Chase
In the desert I often whisper. Junipers are excellent sounding boards. They have been shaped by wing. Rocks seem to care nothing about what I say, yet when I speak to them, they feel porous, capable of receiving my words and taking them in as part of their history of brokenness.
Terry Tempest Williams
The infant New York Times boasted that no newspaper printing what was really worth reading ever perished for lack of readers.
Harold Holzer
Never had he thought, never once, that such a woman existed, one who stood so close to God that God's own voice poured from her. How far she must have gone inside herself to call up that voice. It was as if the voice came from the center part of the earth and by the sheer effort and diligence of her will she had pulled it up through the dirt and rock and through the floorboards of the house, up into her feet, where it pulled through her, reaching, lifting, warmed by her, and then out of the white lily of her throat and straight to God in heaven. It was a miracle and he wept for the gift of bearing witness.
Ann Patchett
My voice is never much louder than a ripple, but even small voices sound loud when you talk about things that matter.
Natalie Lloyd
It only takes one voice to give others the chance to see possibilities.
Aimee Carter
You use your real voice with those you love, and you cannot be phony with those who know you well.
Frederick Buechner
Anna's voice wasn't a beautiful voice - rough edged and sorrowful, a bit used, somehow male and female at once. Yet it had more vibrancy to it than most Danish voices, which were often thin and white and too pretty to trigger a shiver. Anna's voice had the heat of the south; it warmed Einar, as if her throat were read with coals.
David Ebershoff
Hello, Rylan,"Ivy greets me. Even with her transformation, her voice still has that magical quality about it. Her white arms wrap me in a hug, which I return. Throughout the room, I can hear disappointed sighs; the crazy-hot babe is taken.
Colleen Boyd
Besides, my life is a catastrophe. It's a catastrophe to be without a voice.
E B White
Can you be inside and outside at the same time?I think this is where I live.I think this is where most women live.I know this is where writers live.Inside to write. Outside to glean.
Terry Tempest Williams
There are so many different ways for someone to say your name. I’m not sure I ever realized that before I met Jesse. Prior to him, it was just Rose calling out to me with love and affection or Gideon relaying his quiet approval or disapproval. Crisp, clear notes. When Jesse says my name, it’s a chord, a mash-up of several intense emotions all reflected in two syllables.
Paula Stokes
Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.
Austin Kleon
Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches.
Rebecca Solnit
The only way he could have her was to shatter this stubborn faith of hers. In doing so, would he shatter her? 'What has this god of yours ever really done for you?' She stood very still for a long moment, her back to him. 'Everything.
Francine Rivers
Your volume speaks volumes. Be aware of your dynamics, your tones as well as the loudness and softness of your voice on the phone and in person.
Loren Weisman
He doesn't hear but sees the Voice.
Stephen Mitchell
The task of the moral philosopher-thinker is to support and strengthen the voice of human conscience, to recognize what is good or what is bad for people, whether they are good or bad for society in a period of evolution. May be a "voice crying in the wilderness", but only if that voice remains lively and uncompromising, it is possible to transform the desert into fertile land.
Erich Fromm
His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.
Janet Fitch
All I have is a voice.
W.H. Auden
When Jackson used that particular tone of voice, men died, pure and simple.
Christine Feehan
Government is like a baby: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ronald Reagan
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wonder how long it would take for anyone to notice if I just stopped talking.
Laurie Halse Anderson
If you put your politicians up for sale, as the US does (alone in this among industrialized democracies), then someone will buy them--and it won’t be you; you can’t afford them.
Juan Cole
A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor.
Henry David Thoreau
Those who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.
Henry David Thoreau
Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.
Vernor Vinge
Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.
George Packer
... we shoved out many hopes and fears into their hands, believing those hands were strong because they had firm handshakes. They failed us, always. There was no way they could not fail us - they were human, and so were we.
Isaac Marion
However...," Satan said.Bick sighed. "However, I didn't count on the growing interference of lawyers, regulators, bureaucrats and politicians into my business. I swear it seems that every year they stick their noses into more and more."Lucifer chuckled. "Sorry about that-I outdid myself there.
R.S. Belcher
Never give a good politician time to pray.
Stephen King
Politicians were famous for double-speak and were consummate liars. That’s why George W. Bush had to be their favorite president. It’s easier to commit a fraud when the actor believes his lie to the point of a conviction
Kenneth Eade
He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man.
Ross Macdonald
...we can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact.
Walter Lippmann
I wish politicians the world over would stop claiming credit for economic growth that happens despite them, not because of them. Grow up...
Ziad K. Abdelnour
A politician, a man engaged in party contests, must be an opportunist. Let us give up saying that word as if it contained a slur. If you want to win in party action, I take it for granted that you want to lure the majority to your side. I never heard of any man in his senses who was fishing for a minority.
Woodrow Wilson
The wolf reintroduction has gone so well that, somewhat ironically, the wolves are now threatened by their own success. Indeed, virtually all the conditions for strong public support that were evident in the early years of the program remain intact. The scientific and economic studies cited above support the original predictions of benefits, and agency officials remain committed to the policy. Yet some political actors remain hostile to the program. As NPS management assistant Sacklin said, "No amount of good science will stop a politician.
William R. Lowry
The problem with all politicians is that they are human.
Steven Ivy Attorney Entrepreneur
Do you know the one about how politics is show business for the ugly? State politics is show business for ugly people who can't remember their lines.
James Browning
That demon will trick you faster than a politician with a liquor license.
Erik Bundy
Politicians study hard and work diligently their entire lives to be able to stand in front of a national audience and lie through their teeth.
Gregor Collins
PR guys get paid to make people believe that a pile of shit is an investment in soil fertility. Professional liars.”“Ah!” Manannan’s expression lit with comprehension. “They are politicians?
Kevin Hearne
Why should anyone be surprised at what the men "in power" are capable of --didn't every mad-Judas one of them begin his career by slowly & brutally strangling an innocent child?
Kenneth Patchen
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
Gore Vidal
He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality.
Robert Anton Wilson
With good morality first candidates you'll get bad candor, bad ethics, bad loyalty and bad morality - lastly bad odor will surface to save the day if you maintain good optimism like I do.
Brian Spellman
Let us hope that Lysenko's success in Russia will serve for many generations to come as another reminder to the world of how quickly and easily a science can be corrupted when ignorant political leaders deem themselves competent to arbitrate scientific disputes.
Martin Gardner
The essence of Druidry is training the mind to both handle contradictory input and construct contradictory out
Kevin Hearne
In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy.
Howard Fast
Our archaeological ancestry lost hair while growing sweat glands to reduce panting in the hot African sun. One outcome evolved the origin of our speech. Another conquered our ability to shut the hell up and listen. Now? Politicians grunting "On the Origin of Speeches" past one another.
Brian Spellman