Quotes by American Authors - Page 286

The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we'd have an accident in the rain. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way.
Denis Johnson
Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.
William S Burroughs
I'm sure anyone who likes a good crime, provided it is not the victim.
Alfred Hitchcock
people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.
Charles Bukowski
Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out
Martin Scorsese
It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.
Roger Ebert
Is it not strange that the more someone has, the less he feels he has? Envy can never be sated.
Jeff Wheeler
Envy and resentment are terribly corrosive passions. To suffer at the sight or even the thought of others' enjoyment of life makes one a committed enemy of human happiness. Such people end up being practically a curse upon the human race. They vandalize life, exerting themselves not in the pursuit of gain or pleasure, but to hinder others' enjoyment.
Robert Sheaffer
No bird in a cage has ever come to know what the mountain winds feel like, by staring at the free flying birds, wishing that they would fall from the sky!
C. JoyBell C.
I was just thinking... how it is not and it will never be okay to cause pain in someone's life just because of the fact that you are envious of them! Is someone taller than you? Richer than you? More beautiful? That doesn't make it okay to hurt those people, for all you know, they bear deep wounds and carry heavy burdens and their heartache is far greater than anything you could ever bear! People try to hurt people that they're envious of, without knowing that they are adding to what is already painful. And because someone has more than you or has what it is that you want, doesn't mean that they owe you anything! It's not their fault! Be careful, you may just be wounding an angel soul, and a wound inflicted upon an angel soul, will always, always come back to haunt- YOU.
C. JoyBell C.
Marvel hates her because she's pretty and doesn't have any kids to worry about.
Janet Fitch
Life is funny sometimes. Of course it isn’t as funny as smashing your brand new Mustang convertible into your house and having your life flash before your eyes. Sitting here in my car in the middle of my den, I can't help but think that things could have worked out differently - that could have been happier - that could have lived the life that was meant for me. That was, if I didn't have to keep up with the Greenbergs.
Phil Wohl
You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children's books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife's work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing.
Meg Wolitzer
What kind of plan B?" Hale asked. He was almost holding his breath when a voice answered, "My kind." Macey tried to read the look on his face then, but it was gone in a flash. It had been a simple moment of peace and joy and pure happiness. That voice made Hale happy. It kept him calm. It was his backup and his conscience. Macey couldn't help herself, she envied him.
Ally Carter
You can't ever be your heroes, but you can love their gifts.
John Piper
I don't envy "busy." Busy means having a schedule, not living life. What I really covet is leisure and peace of mind. Those who have both, have it all.
Donna Lynn Hope
Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth. Is Envy then such a monster? Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did anybody ever seriously confess to envy? Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime. And not only does everybody disown it, but the better sort are inclined to incredulity when it is in earnest imputed to an intelligent man. But since it's lodgement is in the heart and not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it.
Herman Melville
Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have the pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers.
Tennessee Williams
Harboring envy is saying to God that how He fashioned you in not good enough. Let it go. Embrace who you were created to be.
Ashley N. Sauls
Fiercely guard the passions igniting your heart, so that your flames reach the highest ceilings of success without the eyes of envy.
Suzy Kassem
There is only one invitation it would kill me to refuse, yet I'm tempted to turn it down all the time. I get the invitation every morning when I wake up to actually live a life of complete engagement, a life of whimsy, a life where love does. It doesn't come in an envelope. It's ushered in by a sunrise, the sound of a bird, or the smell of coffee drifting lazily from the kitchen. It's the invitation to actually live, to fully participate in this amazing life for one more day. Nobody turns down an invitation to the White House, but I've seen plenty of people turn down an invitation to fully live.Turning down this invitation comes in lots of flavors. It looks like numbing yourself or distracting yourself or seeing something really beautiful as normal. It can also look like refusing to forgive or not being grateful or getting wrapped around the axle with fear or envy. I think every day God sends us an invitation to live and sometimes we forget to show up or get head-faked into thinking we haven't really been invited. But you see, we have been invited -- every day, all over again
Bob Goff
At the heart of her bad nature, like many bad natures, was probably envy. And at the heart of envy was possibly hope - that the good fortune of others might one day be hers
Katherine Boo
What a shame to be so angered by what you don't have that you treat what you do have like it's nothing.
Caroline Kepnes
For Jack Kennedy, who only made campaigning LOOK easy, it was, in fact, anything but.
David Pietrusza
Even envy, wants to even the score.
Anthony Liccione
Never be envious of what someone else has.You don't know the price they paid to get it, and you don't know the price they are paying to keep it.
Stephan Labossiere
He has a mouth, lord," Gerbruht said."I envy him," I said."Envy him, lord?""Most of us have to lower our trews to shit.
Bernard Cornwell
The best heroines, she'd always believed, took their fate into their own hands.
Anna Godbersen
What a privilege it is to live now, at just this moment, and to be able to go anywhere....
Anna Godbersen
It is difficult to be ambitious without also being envious.
Joseph Epstein
I wanted what women always want: permission. But he'd had that before this book was even written; it was, after all, the first thing I'd envied about him. It was arguably what enabled him to write the book in the first place. ("Envy")
Kathryn Chetkovich
When I envied a man's spurs then they were indeed worth coveting.
Zane Grey
When you're and only child in a family with an only parent, you look at other, bigger families with envy. Mary Alice had a family with a station wagon, a split-level house, and a pool. But then I looked up and saw Mary Alice's toes, as she stood at the edged of the diving board. Her second toe lay on top of her big toe on each foot. I had never seen such a thing. I wondered if Mary Alice's toes would ever prevent her from doing the things she wanted to do in life. "Look, y'all!" she said, forming her perfect body into a perfect swan's dive. I decided then that any time I got frustrated with my overall situation in life, mad or jealous of knee socks or a pink canopy bed in a pink room, I'd take a deep breath and think about Mary Alice's toes. At least I didn't have Mary Alice's toes.
Margaret McMullan
To all apparent beauties blind, each blemish strikes an envious mind.
Benjamin Franklin
Some people suffer from the green-eyed monster called envy.
Ana Monnar
Envy is the art of counting the other fellow's blessings instead of your own.
Harold G. Coffin
The fenced-in dog barks at the one running free.
Marty Rubin
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
Gore Vidal
Heart-stopping envy is the sincerest form of flattery.
Anna Godbersen
There is no disappointment so numbing...as someone no better than you achieving more.
Joseph Heller
To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girlfriends.
Benjamin Franklin
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
If the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, you can bet the water bill is higher.
Debbie Macomber
There was no pleasure like being envied on a mass scale.
Anna Godbersen
They'll either want to kill you, kiss you, or be you.
Suzanne Collins
And for a split second Cleo saw the value in living openly. Liberation was Windex for the soul. It let the light shine through. But why dwell? Nothing was ever going to change.
Lisi Harrison
Seconds seem like a life time when the life you lived is slowly drained out of you by those who care not what you felt, hoped, or dreamed. When the darkness comes it is all consuming, there is no light and there is no pain. It is the never ending loss of hope that now consumes me as I die in his arms.
Cassandra Giovanni
Hayden shouts, "To the new Teen Uprising!
Neal Shusterman
Do either of you even play baseball?
Jeff Davis
A book can take you to another land, even if just for a few hours. --Cat Spydell
Cat Spydell
Once you love something, you always love it in someway. You have to. it's like, part of you for good.
Sarah Dessen
I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.
Bernard M. Baruch
You know you've got problems when your head is hanging over the toilet, puking up your dinner, and what you're thinking of is your dad. And how he thinks you're not pretty.
Teresa Lo
I just wanted one more day." More tears welled up in her eyes. "But it would never be enough. I could keep asking for one more day for the rest of my life.
Cindi Madsen
Do you ... still believe?''Our very presence here, a Polynesian goddess sitting next to a Zulu thunder god, listening to the song of a Greek siren, should be proof enough that religions can and do coexist.' He looked back at the cross over the entryway. 'And I still do not know.
Karsten Knight
The thing is, if you're an ugly goon when you're 15, you're an ugly goon for the rest of your life — until the day you die. You're always a goon, even if lots of years go by, even if you get married and have a kid, even if you're more successful than you ever thought you'd be in your wildest dreams. You're still that same goon who everybody laughed at. It never changes.
David Handler
Why am I doing this? Because it feels so good to talk like we used to, even though I know this is just a shadow of what we had. But I chase it anyway.
Daisy Whitney
Everybody should have a librarian.
Beth Fantaskey
She, of all people, knew the sacred trust that word -- "librarian" -- implied. Because a librarian was supposed to to be a spiritual, intellectual mentor who kept your secrets and didn't give you a funny look when you checked out a book on the care and feeding of pythons...A librarian opened up new doors for you, intellectually, too, without shoving you through them.A librarian was important.
Beth Fantaskey
I'm really too young to go out into the world alone," he thought as he lay down.
E B White