Quotes by American Authors - Page 26

You don't have to believe in coincidences because they happen every day. The trick is to be able to discern when something is more than coincidence.
Glenn Jones
Don't hang yourself with the slack you've been given.
Krista Ritchie
NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
Sinclair Lewis
How often had she wondered what would have happened if she'd remained with Jonathan? Not often, but regularly over the years. It was impossible not to have imagined that rejected future, a life of many countries, of vast and enduring adventure, of tiny rooms and rental houses. It was the sense of missed opportunity that returned to her, frightening but real, overwhelmingly real.
Michael Stein
You were right the first time, Cathy. It was a stupid, silly story.Ridiculous! Only insane people would die for the sake of love. I'llbet you a hundred to one a woman wrote that junky romantic trash!"Just a minute ago I'd despised that author for bringing about such amiserable ending, then there I went, rushing to the defense. "T. M.Ellis could very well have been a man! Though I doubt any woman writerin the nineteenth century had much chance of being published, unlessshe used her initials, or a man's name. And why is it all men thinkeverything a woman writes is trivial or trashy-or just plain sillydrivel? Don't men have romantic notions? Don't men dream of findingthe perfect love? And it seems to me, that Raymond was far moremushy-minded than Lily!
V.C. Andrews
In time, she eased into sleep, and her head rested against the plane of his shoulder. He held her and wondered that such a simple intimacy between a man and woman could mean so much.
Dorien Kelly
You know what they say. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”“If my heart grows any fonder, it’s going to hop out of my chest and into yours.
Olivia Cunning
This was home. This was perfection. This was everything he'd never known he wanted. (Griff)
Jami Gold
The kiss wove between gentle and frenzied, liquid and greedy, silken and primal, and he sucked every second of bliss he could from the forbidden pleasure.
Jami Gold
My spirit is free. My heart is taken.
Crystal Woods
It's not how long you see something. It's how you intensely you feel it"From Central Park Song: a Screenplay
Zack Love
His smiles were hard won, but when they came, they were well worth it. They lit up his face like summer sunshine. The rest of the time, and far more frequently, he seemed lost in winter. And when he laughed, he was a different person.
Danielle Steel
Quinn spoke their language—all mystery and inside jokes, scarred souls and statement shirts. It was a beautiful moment for him—in his element and completely happy.When they started playing, he leaned over and whispered in my ear. “See that guitar?”I nodded.“That’s a 1969 Martin D28. Hear me when I say if I had to choose between a beautiful girl and that guitar, I’d choose the guitar. Natch.” He took a huge gulp of water, clearly affected.“Naturally,” I whispered. “It could be why you’re still single.
Laura Anderson Kurk
I wiggle my eyebrows. 'Sorry, Evan, I can't make out with you while the dog is aligning himself with a magnetic field.
Cheyanne Young
But in this crowd, my blond ponytail stood out like a crescent moon in a midnight sky.
Kristin Bartley Lenz
This is what I want to do with Violet - give her only the good, keep away the bad, so that good is all we ever have around us
Jennifer Niven
The road ahead holds many tests challenging everything she ever believed. I whispered a prayer for her inner strength to guide her on her path. She was going to need it.
Cambria Hebert
I'm hideous""You could never be hideous""Forget it" I wanted this conversation over."I can't forget it," Gran said, not giving up so easily. "I don't like to hear you talk about yourself that way. Your scars do not define you, young lady. Your action do.
Cambria Hebert
I did some research on this a couple years ago," Augustus continued. "I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?""And are there?" "Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about
John Green
My parents and grandparents did not tolerate idle thoughts or behavior. If the action did not have a purpose or lead you in a positive direction, their feeling was “why bother?” This is how I was built. This is why I refuse to fail.
Carlos Wallace
The truth may hurt, but fooling yourself will enslave you.
Charles F. Glassman
Life is just repeated attempts at trying to do better.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Never be afraid to offer a smile; sure the risk is that a few foolish people may misinterpret your kindness as weakness, but the reward in their error be that at least they cannot blame you because you did show your teeth.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
The thing about a hero, is even when it doesn't look like there's a light at the end of the tunnel, he's going to keep digging, he's going to keep trying to do right and make up for what's gone before, just because that's who he is.
Joss Whedon
Love will commit, or love will commit suicide.
Anthony Liccione
Brendan stopped reading. The words had melted into a liquid blur...In his possession was a box full of information that would likely fill in the gaps and help him to wrap his brain around the whys of her death. And yet, there was really only one question that mattered, and Tommy had already answered it.
Lynda Meyers
The only way that your work will truly find an audience is if it is genuine.
Gina Marinello-Sweeney
Live the dream awake.
Tia Walker
Isn't it fun to work— or don't you ever do it? It's especially fun when your kind of work is the thing you'd rather do more than anything else in the world. I've been writing as fast as my pen would go every day this summer, and my only quarrel with life is that the days aren't long enough to write all the beautiful and valuable and entertaining thoughts I'm thinking. I've finished the second draft of my book and am going to begin the third tomorrow morning at half-past seven. It's the sweetest book you ever saw— it is, truly. I think of nothing else. I can barely wait in the morning to dress and eat before beginning; then I write and write and write till suddenly I'm so tired that I'm limp all over.
Jean Webster
Islamo-Fascism is NOT the result of economic deprivation or legitimate blowback because of Western foreign policies or even heinous drone attacks on Muslim civilians. All non-Muslims as Infidels, regardless of their faith or lack of it, are in an ideological war with a demonized, freedom-hating Muslim death-cult rooted in their accurate interpretation of the Qur'an!
Gary Patton
Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest."Their skepticism is comprehensible. In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that calling Muslims 'ancient' was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil."Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.
Graeme Wood
It would be facile, even exculpatory, to call the problem of the Islamic State 'a problem with Islam.' The religion allows many interpretations, and Islamic State supporters are morally on the hook for the one they choose. And yet simply denouncing the Islamic State as un-Islamic can be counterproductive, especially if those who hear the message have read the holy texts and seen the endorsement of many of the caliphate’s practices written plainly within them.
Graeme Wood
The Islamic State’s ideology exerts powerful sway over a certain subset of the population. Life’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies vanish in its face. Musa Cerantonio and the Salafis I met in London are unstumpable: No question I posed left them stuttering. They lectured me garrulously and, if one accepts their premises, convincingly. To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that they would win. If they had been froth-spewing maniacs, I might be able to predict that their movement would burn out as the psychopaths detonated themselves or became drone-splats, one by one. But these men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as anything else.
Graeme Wood
Muslim and non-Muslim from across the world flocked to Baghdad to be part of Al-Ma'mun's project "Bait Al-Hekmah" or "House of Wisdom
Firas Alkhateeb
The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European poeples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable.
Talal Asad
For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past–no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.
David Kushner
...a disciplined pursuit of less will keep us focused and make the greatest impact.
Tim Hiller
Whatever you focus on expands.
Brownell Landrum
...Learn to concentrate, to give all your attention to the thing at hand, and then to be able to put it aside and go on to the next thing without confusion. My husband said that being President of the United States meant that you saw more kinds of people, took up more subjects, and learn more about a variety of things than anyone else. But it required complete concentration on the person you were with and on what he was saying. When that person left the room, you pulled down a shade in your mind, and you were ready, with your attention free, for what the next person had to say. You might have to shift from banking to forestry, but each subject had the attention and concentration it required and each, in turn, was put in the back of the mind, ready to be called upon when needed.
Eleanor Roosevelt
...you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being.
Brian Tracy
Two questions form the foundation of all novels: "What if?" and "What next?" (A third question, "What now?", is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it's more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.
Tom Clancy
Publishers, readers, booksellers, even critics, acclaim the novel that one can deliciously sink into, forget oneself in, the novel that returns us to the innocence of childhood or the dream of the cartoon, the novel of a thousand confections and no unwanted significance. What becomes harder to find, and lonelier to defend, is the idea of the novel as—in Ford Madox Ford’s words—a “medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case.
James Wood
With the right tools, you can write anything ...
Jeff Lyons
The men were smashing windows and aiming their weapons through them. The driver had opened the door and was shouting for the women and children to get out and run and hide. But Ilina realized in some vague way that he never managed to actually say the word "hide." He really said, "Women and children, get out, get out, get out! Run and..." The clerk's wife thought it was odd that he had stopped in the middle of a sentence, and even stranger that she herself knew the word, heard the word "hide" in her head when the driver stopped talking.
Clark Zlotchew
Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.
Peter Straub
Every book I've read appears in my writing.
Rob Bignell
There's a hum that happens inside my head when I hit a certain writing rhythm, a certain speed. When laying track goes from feeling like climbing a mountain on my hands and knees to feeling like flying effortlessly through the air. Like breaking the sound barrier. everything inside me just shifts. I break the writing barrier. And the feeling of laying track changes, transforms, shifts from exertion into exultation.
Shonda Rhimes
I truly don’t understand why at every Q and A, someone always asks, “Do you have a routine?” or “Do you write every morning?” Why those questions remain interesting, I really have no idea. But since no one’s putting a gun to their head to ask them, they must compel. They’re probably necessary on a symbolic level more than a literal one, as people cobble together an imagination of what a life devoted to “making” might be like.[I think people want a path to follow. They want a checklist so they can say, “Alright cool, so if I get up at six and I write for this long and I watch this film and I do that…”]It’s weird, because I might have wanted that, too. I used to dance in New York. My Lower East Side days. Modern dance, or whatever. One thing I learned as a dancer was that people learn combinations different ways. Some people, if they get the right side, they can also get the left side right off the top of their head. Some people need to be taught both right and left. Some people count, some people never count, you know? I noticed then that, for me, it was really watching the whole person dancing, trying to take in the whole combination at once, that helped me learn it. I think I’m the same way as a reader—I like to take in the whole book, not getting too specific about how they did it, but ride the bigger example.I mean, at the end of the day, the answer to the question “How did you do it?” is right there, on the page. They’re showing you how they did it, by doing it. Maybe it’s different with art, when you don’t know if someone had all their sculptures knitted or welded by elves somewhere, but with writing, the answer to the question “How do you write a book like this?” is usually, “Like this” [points to book].
Maggie Nelson
There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.
Charles Bukowski
Criticism is no threat to your self-esteem or identity, but rather informs you.
Bryant McGill
You ask a certain question again and again, in a sincere fashion, and the answer appears. But, in my experience, at least, that answer arrives according to it's own mysterious celestial timing, and often in disguise. And it comes in a way you're not prepared for, or don't want, or can't at first, accept.
Roland Merullo
He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.
Vladimir Nabokov
It was amazing the things you could bring yourself to do when you felt insecure, when you were out to protect your heart. You could deny it what it wants most, just for the sake of saving your pride or dodging another bullet.
Rachael Wade
Damn tricky cats!
Shelly Laurenston
If he didn't have Ronnie already in his arms he'd have assumed she'd just opened the door...and aged a few years. Wow, he thought in surprise, she's going to be hot when we hit fifty.
Shelly Laurenston
Yes. I appreciate the helpful and long spreadsheet with all the many places you can't go.
Shelly Laurenston
Ronnie snarled and Brendon roared back.Her eyes narrowed. "You roared at me?""And I'll do it again if you can't keep your paws off my Oreos.
Shelly Laurenston
She pulled her lips away again. "Wait!"He stopped and stared at her."I'm relatively positive we're not supposed to be doing this.""Who says?""The laws of nature and God.""Laws are made to be broken and God just wants us to be happy." Fucking this woman would make him so damn happy. "Come on. Let's go break some laws.
Shelly Laurenston
The amazing ones are, those that don't know it!
Anthony Liccione