Quotes by American Authors - Page 3172

Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.
Poppy Z. Brite
THE WEATHER OF LOVELoveHas a way of wiltingOr blossomingAt the strangest,Most unpredictable hour.This is how love is,An uncontrollable beastIn the form of a flower.The sun does not always shine on it.Nor does the rain always pour on itNor should it always get beaten by a storm.Love does not always emit the sweetest scents,And sometimes it can sting with its thorns.Water it.Give it plenty of sunlight.Nurture it,And the flower of love willOutlive you.Neglect it or keep dissecting it,And its petals will quickly curl up and die.This is how love is,Perfection is a delusional vision.So love the person who loves youUnconditionally,And abandon the oneWho only loves youUnder favorableConditions.
Suzy Kassem
I don't eat friggin' lobster or anything like that. Because they're alive when you kill it.
Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi
Death is harder on those who are left behind.
Robert La Fosse
Remember where you came from, where you’re going, and why you created the mess you got yourself into in the first place. You're going to die a horrible death, remember. It's all good training, and you'll enjoy it more if you keep the facts in mind. Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less-advanced life-forms, and they'll call you crazy.
Richard Bach
Embrace the probability of your imminent death....and know there is nothing i can do to save you.
Suzanne Collins
Let me tell you something about dying: it's not as bad as they says.it's the coming-back-to-life part that hurts.
Lauren Oliver
When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself.
John Green
Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.
Cormac McCarthy
As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Death is just the last scene of the last act.
Joyce Carol Oates
And then his noise falls completely silent-And he stops struggling-And looking right into my eyes-He dies.My Todd dies.
Patrick Ness
Then one morning she’d begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn’t remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she’d realized again what she’d learned at five when her mother left – that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting the small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she’d worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother’s voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree’s heartwood. (51)
Ron Rash
Um..." Hazel faltered. "You mean you won't... you're not going to-" "Claim your life?" Thantos asked. "Well, let's see..." He pulled a pure-black iPad from thin air. Death, tapped the screen a few times, and all Frank could think was: Please don't let there be an app for reaping souls. "I don't see you on the list," Thantos said. "Pluto gives me specific orders for escaped souls, you see. For some reason, he has not issued a warrant for yours. Perhaps he feels your life is not finished, or it could be n oversight. If you'd like me to call and ask-" "No!" Hazel yelped. "That's okay." "Are you sure?" Death asked helpfully. "I have video-conferencing enabled. I have his Skype address here somewhere...
Rick Riordan
Then there’s the kind of zombie I’ve become now: the one who has lost everything—his brain, his heart, his light, his direction. He wanders the world, bumping into this, tripping over that, but keeps going and going. That is life after death.
Adam Silvera
Tell me not in mournful numbers,Life is but an empty dream!For the soul is dead that slumbers,And things are not what they seem.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I’d give in to the grief but make sure I wasn’t loud enough to draw attention from those who think words will make me feel better.
Adam Silvera
Please don't die.
Randy Pausch
Perhaps it's better if I live in your heart, where the world can't see me. If I'm dead, there will be no stain on our love.
Greta Garbo
Tonight I saw myself in the dark window asthe image of my father, whose lifewas spent like this,thinking of death, to the exclusionof other sensual matters,so in the end that lifewas easy to give up, sinceit contained nothing: evenmy mother's voice couldn't make himchange or turn backas he believedthat once you can't love another human beingyou have no place in the world.
Louise Glück
I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true.
Maya Angelou
Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness.
Mark Mirabello
The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.
Paula Poundstone
I used to love youI still doSo SelfishI love the old youThe you that didnt shoot drugs...The you that didnt get beat on by menYou laugh in my face and call me a foolBut its trueI still love youSometimes,I can see the old youWhen your eyes flashWhen you almost look alive
Henry Rollins
What is a man's life but a prelude to his death? And what is death but a long sleep, a most welcome forgetfulness.
Lisa M. Klein
They don't make morgues with windows. In fact, if the geography allows for it, they hardly ever make morgues above the ground. I guess it's partly because it must be eisier to refrigerate a bunch of coffin-sized chambers in a room insulated by the earth. But that can't be all there is to it. Under the earth means a lot more than relative altitude. It's where dead things fit. Graves are under the earth. So are Hell, Gehenna, Hades, and a dozen other reported afterlives.Maybe it says somthing about people. Maybe for us, under the earth is a subtle and profound statement. Maybe ground level provides us with a kind of symbolic boundary marker, an artificial construct that helps us remember that we are alive. Mabye it helps us push death's shadow back from our lives.I live in a basement apartment and like it. What does that say about me?Probably that I overanalyze things.
Jim Butcher
At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I'd end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat empty.
Nicole Krauss
Odd, isn’t it? You know when your birthday is, but not your death day, even though you pass the date year after year, never suspecting that some day…
Mary Downing Hahn
She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a tiny, bloody angel in the snow, and they were going to destroy her.
Maggie Stiefvater
When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They accept death with a grace that I hope I will one day be brave enough to muster.
Dean Koontz
Death alone gives meaning to life, and you will never fully live until you know you must die. And make your peace with that knowledge.
Alice Borchardt
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!
Edgar Allan Poe
Sorry to hear about your Dad."He shrugged. "He was seventy, and we always told him fast food would kill him.""Heart attack?""He was hit by a Pizza Express truck.
J.A. Konrath
Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
Tom Robbins
The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.
Hunter S. Thompson
A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.
Barbara Kingsolver
My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to seeIf Immortality unveil A third event to me,So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell.Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.
Emily Dickinson
I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
James Baldwin
Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.
Mary Karr
No man should go to Valhalla with brothel rash.
Mark Lawrence
I believe that more people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.
Nancy Reagan
Nothing, they say is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying
Thomas Paine
Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.
Mary Roach
But often life asks much of you, and you either honor life by answering with all your heart, or you cower your way into your grave.
James Clemens
Life is a predicament which precedes death.
Henry James
Take what comes and live life without complaint. What will be, will be. Life is a woman's gift; death is God's.
Nancy McKenzie
I am forever walking upon these shores,Betwixt the sand and the foam,The high tide will erase my food prints,And the wind will blow away the foam,But the sea and the shore will remain forever.
Kahlil Gibran
He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that - his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths - but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal.
Tom Robbins
The dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive
Stanley Kubrick
when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.
William S Burroughs
I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Then Thalia Grace became their leader and started recruiting even more young women to their cause, which grated on Nico – as if Bianca’s death could be forgotten. As if she could be replaced.
Rick Riordan
I wonder if it hurts to live,And if they have to try,And whether, could they choose between,They would not rather die.
Emily Dickinson
Does it make you brave to stick your hand in a bear's mouth? Would you do it again just because you didn't die?
Robert Jordan
Death is the Graduation of the Soul
Sylvia Browne
I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.
Roman Payne
[Children] just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them, as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives.
Nancy E. Turner
Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.
Zeena Schreck
Our knowledge of life is limited to death
Erich Maria Remarque
If you love someone, you're not supposed to want them to come back. Better a peaceful sleep in the earth than the life of a zombie--not really dead but not really alive, either.
Cassandra Clare