Quotes by American Authors - Page 243

Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.
Ray Bradbury
Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.
Stephen King
My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself.
Robert A. Heinlein
She walked forward, feeling the dew on the grass with each step. She tightened her eyes, welcoming the darkness.
Eveli Acosta
Twentyone is too old to go anywhere alone, you know that. I want to go with someone. I don't mean as a bride, I'm not so gauche as that, but as a mistress or paramour or concubine or companion or friend or pal or anything else. I just don't want to be left alone! I want to get out of here!" She said it again for all the wide-faced flowers to hear: "I want to get out of here!
Douglas Woolf
You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and M a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedoms swift winged angels, that fly around the world; I am confined in the bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that if I were on one of your gallant decks, under your protecting wing! Alas! Betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O, that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God! Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand. Get caught, or clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it; 100 miles straight north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God is helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This is very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in the Northeast course from Northpoint. I will do the same; and when I get to the head of the bay, I will turn my canoe adrift, and walked straight through Delaware into Pennsylvania. When I get there, I shall not be required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed. Let but the first opportunity offer, and, come what will, I am off. Meanwhile, I will try to bear up under the yoke. I am not the only slave in the world. Why should I be free? I can bear as much as any of them. Besides I am but a boy, and all boys are bound to some one. It may be that my misery and slavery will only increase the happiness when I get free there is a better day coming. [62 – 63]
Frederick Douglass
So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the oldfield pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. IT is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
Robert Penn Warren
Deanna Durbin's movies are about innocence and sweetness. They're from a different time and a different place. Outside the movie house, there was Depression, poverty, war, death, and loss. Audiences then were willing to pretend, to enter into a game of escape. No one really thought that the world was like a Deanna Durbin movie, they just wanted to pretend it was for about an hour and a half.
Jeanine Basinger
How much better it would be if they weren't so damn understanding--if they kicked me out of the house. To find yourself out in the street with two dollars to your name, to catch the streetcar downtown and get a job, perhaps as an airline stewardess. Think how wonderful it would be to fly to Houston and back three times a week for the next twenty years. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. It would be wonderful.
Walker Percy
The veneer of civilization fell away to reveal desperate animals, humanity at their worst.
Travis Luedke
And you wanted to escape,' a man near me whispered to another man. 'You wanted to run off into the woods and fight. But do you see? Do you see what the rest of them think about us? These people would sell you back to the Nazis for a sack of potatoes and then toast you at their dinner table.
Alan Gratz
Sometimes I wish I was in the movies...Not to be famous or nothing. I just wish I was made of light. Then nobody’d know me except for what they saw up on that screen. I’d just be light up on the silver screen, and not at all a man.
Alan Heathcock
Before I knew escape, life was something to be endured, passively. Now I hunger for it.
Kristin Halbrook
Unicorns know naught of shame, or need, or doubt, or debt;But mortals, as you may have noticed, take what they can get.
Peter S Beagle
We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.
Edward Abbey
Unfortunately, the escape became the trap.
Marcia Cameron
son," Mr. P said. "You're going to find more and more hope the farther and farther you walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation.
Sherman Alexie
All children want to go to space. Earth only offers parents wailing about overdraft notices and evening news playing in an empty den. Dead pets too. Childhood is a rot. And so they look up and see stars shiver, ancient information only just now arriving, because that is the only place left to look, and they yearn.
David Connerley Nahm
There is no escape for me now, I know. Everything is over. I had my run. I was a murderer, a beautiful one, but I lived in a house of cards all my life and now it's all coming back to punish me, and there is no escape.
Katherine Ewell
He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.)
Vladimir Nabokov
Only the ones who run are worth catching.
Josephine Angelini
The hurts from my last day with my father are healed now, but I want to remember where they were; I want to remember what I escaped for as long as I live.
Veronica Roth
I was a good lawyer , and most days that was enough. I was aware, however, that I took refuge in my profession, as unlikely as that seemed considering the amount of human suffering I dealt with. It offered me a role to escape into, from what I no longer knew; perhaps nothing more significant than my own little ration of suffering.
Michael Nava
Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re gonna do. I’m just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.”t“Huh?” I asked.t“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
John Green
I thought about all the people who'd had to do this through history. The millions taking flight from disasters, fleeing tyrannical despots, making exodus from pogroms, escaping waring soldiers and pouring out of bombed cities. What had kept them going was the promise of safe haven, whether in some sprawling refugee camp or under the protection of a friendly army. We didn't have that.
Michael Adams
Once we were alone, Imogen unfolded her hand. In it, she held the key to the chains. I had passed it to her while we were in the embrace. Roden noticed it and scowled. "You gave her the key and not me? I could be free already."I smiled at him. "Yes, but I wasn't going to kiss you.""Fair enough
Jennifer A. Nielsen
There’s one last reason why none of us ever tries to escape. There are a few of us who just don’t have anywhere else to go.
Jason Medina
Sometimes all you know about where you're going is that it's away from where you are.
Leah Raeder
I lean back against the velvet-cushioned seat and close my eyes to the sound of hooves pounding hard against the cobblestone streets. Their clip-clopping harmony keeping perfect tempo with the rumble of carriage wheels, affording a sound as sweet as any symphony I've ever heard. It's the sound of escapeThe sound of goodbyeA sound that's served to soothe me in the past, providing the much-needed assurance that the unwelcome inquiries and suspicions of newly alerted acquaintances would soon fade - allowing for a brief respite in a new location, before I'm on the move again.I'm a gypsy.A nomad.A vagabond.A drifter.
Alyson Noel
Woe be to the wug who forgets that destroying one part of a thing does not equal victory
David Baldacci
If poetry escapes my mouth then it shall seek comfort in your heart. Will you keep it safe?
Delano Johnson
And so, now, it is almost midnight of the first day, and I have broken my resolution to go to bedearly - postponing sleep, and thereby the inevitable waking up in tomorrow. Another device of escape.
Silvia Plath
Promise me that if you get a chance to escape without me, you will do it. He won't kill me. Go find your men and come back for me." His eyelids and brows lowered. " You don't know me very well or you wouldn't say such a thing. I won't leave you.
Melanie Dickerson
Maybe that's why Claire had perfected the art of invisibility. It was a form of self-preservation. You couldn't resent what you could not see. She was so quiet, but she noticed everything. Her eyes tracked the world like it was a book written in a language that she could not understand. There was nothing timorous about her, but you got the feeling that she always had one foot out the door. If the situation got too hard, or too intense, she would simply disappear.
Karin Slaughter
Little thieves get shot, but great ones escape.” Kelly Oliver, WOLF: A Jessica James Mystery
Kelly Oliver
I wasn't in danger today," I tell him in a choked voice. "I escaped danger today." And I did... I feel like the whole day has been an electrical shock, paddles straight to my heart, bringing me out of a lifelong torpor I hadn't even known I was in. "I escaped," I repeat.
Gayle Forman
Don’t pretend, Bianca,” he said. “You’re smarter than that, and so am I. I finally figured out what you meant when you left. You said you were like Hester. I get it now. The first time you came to my house, when we wrote that paper, you said Hester was trying to escape. But everything caught up with Hester in the end, didn’t it? Well, something finally caught up with you, but you’re just running away again. Only, he”-Wesley pointed to my bedroom door-“is your escape this time.” He took a step toward me, forcing me to crane my neck even more to see his face. “Admit it, Duffy.”“Admit what?”“That you’re running away from me,” he said. “You realized you’re in love with me and you bailed because it scared the shit out of you.
Kody Keplinger
The last great escape. I was done gambling, done betting on a ship that would never come in. I would cash in my chips while I was ahead. I didn't want to suffer the growing old, didn't want to wait until my memory went. It was all so tiresome. I would just go out in a blaze of glory before the parasites of sadness got at me and made me bitter. After that's the American way: take your own life before everything else takes it from you.
Brian James
There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows.
Steven Gould
Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores. — Teller: A Novel
Frederick Weisel
Eve engaged her On Duty sign and stepped out of the car. Immediately her ears were assaulted with a blast of music. Christmas carols pumped, full blast, into the air. She decided that people ran inside, ready to buy anything, just to escape the noise.
J D ROBB
You don't need to know what you're escaping from to become a fugitive.
Bella Pollen
By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a child. The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape.
Thomas Wolfe
Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.
Philip K Dick
That's the funny thing about trying to escape. You never really can. Maybe temporarily, but not completely.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
Junot Díaz
Climbing is as close as we can come to flying.
Margaret Young
The backside of mountain is a fight against human nature," he said. "You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up.
Mitch Albom
One isn't improved by being at the top of the mountain, one is improved by the climb."- Poppy (quoting Win)
Lisa Kleypas
No, not conquer, that is too foolish a world. Any man who scales a mountain is still but a man, a transient speck compared to the immensity and permanence of a mountain .
James Rozoff
Working on the summit of Mauna Kea was comparable to working on the hospital pulmonary ward with sick people sucking on oxygen cylinders.
Steven Magee
My Everest is not your Everest. Your Everest is not mine. We all have an Everest. Each of us. Sometimes the peak is literally Mount Everest but most times it lies deep within us, figuratively occupying a mountainous inner space. It calls us to rise up, to do what we formerly labeled as impossible, and to be who we deeply and desperately want to be. I know that I have found an Everest when my soul furiously pokes me repeatedly until I listen. Heeding this call to passionate adventure of any sort initiates a journey of intense immense proportion that changes every molecule of my being.
T.A. Loeffler
Looking out of a tent door into a world of snow and vanishing hopes. ~George Mallory
Conrad Anker
They were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time another part guessed that youth was about over for them and what lay ahead was another country entirely, wherein the possibilities narrowed down moment by moment.
Charles Frazier
Good things never last, bad things never die.
John Darnielle
How do you fight against a mountain? How do you move it when you don't even have a shovel?” “Maybe you don't have to move it,” Etta said, folding the gown over the lid of the trunk. “Maybe you have to climb it.
Alexandra Bracken
Mothman flew away from town, like a giant bat, and then disappeared from sight behind a thicket of skeletal autumn trees.
Don Roff
Did you hear about the lawsuit? Mary asked."No, what?""I hear that he is so big," she lifted her eyebrows to indicate what she meant, "that he put a girl in the hospital and she is suing him, because she can never have babies because of him.""Ewwwwwwwwwww!!!!" the sisters chorused."Could a guy really do that?" Lydia asked.Elizabeth shrugged. "I guess, but he would have to be the size of a friggin' oak tree.
Heather Lynn Rigaud
People here had redwood trees in their backyards. You were never far from the infinite.
Amy Stewart
I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.
Bill McKibben