Quotes by American Authors - Page 3175

Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.
Lady Gaga
If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
Christopher Hitchens
She was a wolf. She was death, devourer of the worlds.
Sarah J Maas
I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.
Victoria Hanley
I tried to hang myself with a bungee cord. I kept almost dying.
Steven Wright
She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.
Ursula K Le Guin
It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.
Cormac McCarthy
Oh Julie, wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?
Elizabeth Wein
I am only alive because I have not yet died.
Anthony Doerr
I said, 'I need to know how he died.'He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?'So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.
John Green
...the dead have a way of becoming saints in the eyes of their survivors...
Rachel Vincent
The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize you only lived on paper. Your only adventures were make-believe, and while the world fought and kissed, you sat in some dark room masturbating and making money.
Chuck Palahniuk
They say that somewhere in Africa the elephants have a secret grave where they go to lie down, unburden their wrinkled gray bodies, and soar away, light spirits at the end.
Robert McCammon
When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.
Don DeLillo
After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it. Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your shining hair in the sun. I have not seen this with my eyes, but only with my imagination, that makes pictures, that always wanted to paint you, shining; but I hope that this vision will be true, anyway.
Audrey Niffenegger
Got it. Demon. Death. Doom.
Kami Garcia
Everyone you have ever loved in your life becomes a part of your soul. They never leave. They're always inside you, and you can bring them out whenever you want.
Nate Kenyon
Do you know why hurricanes have names instead of numbers? To keep the killing personal. No one cares about a bunch of people killed by a number. '200 Dead as Number Three Slams Ashore' is not nearly as interesting a headline as 'Charlie kills 200.' Death is much more satisfying and entertaining if you personalize it.Me, I'm still waitin' for Hurricane Ed. Old Ed wouldn't hurt ya, would he? Sounds kinda friendly. 'Hell no, we ain't evacuatin'. Ed's comin'!
George Carlin
[HAMILTON]I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.
Roger Zelazny
Every night death came, slowly, painfully, and every morning Maddox awoke in bed, knowing he'd have to die again later. That was his greatest curse and his eternal punishment.
Gena Showalter
The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.
Stephen King
He would never be any different and now Scarlett realize the truth and accepted it without emotion—that until he died Gerald would always be waiting for Ellen, always listening for her. Her was in some dim borderline country where time was standing still and Ellen was always in the next room. The mainspring of his existence was taken away when she died and with it has gone his bounding assurance, his impudence and his restless vitality. Ellen was the audience before which the blustering drama of Gerald O'Hara had been played Now the curtain had been rung down forever, the footlights dimmed and the audience suddenly vanished, while the stunned old actor remained on his empty stage, waiting for his cues.
Margaret Mitchell
That night, the Raka conspirators had plenty of news to report, particularly Ochobu. Aly had not known that the mages of the Chain had been laboring to eliminate any mages who had worked magic on the Crown’s behalf. So far they had killed seven of the most powerful.Chelaol would call this count of the dead another ‘good start,’ Aly thought grimly. This crude business of counting up lives taken struck her as a bad idea. It took the horror from death. When Ochobu named four mages on Lombyn who had had been killed in the streets of their towns, it had been about numbers, not lives. Maybe this is how you become a Rittevon, she thought. You get used to the dead being described as numbers, not fathers or daughters or grandparents.She turned to Dove when Ochobu finished, 'don’t ever be like this,' she urged. 'don’t think that it doesn’t matter if you only hear of murder as a number. If you keep it at a distance.
Tamora Pierce
Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes shape.
Sheri Reynolds
Death always wins.
Kelly Creagh
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
Raymond Chandler
With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything...
Saul Bellow
I g-g-guess...I'm dead?" she heard her own voice call out, strangely high-pitched and thin.For a long time, she heard nothing else. And then:"Hi, Dead. I'm Dan.
Peter Lerangis
Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?
Libba Bray
I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.
John Green
I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything should just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment'.
Andy Warhol
Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is giving you a secret message. He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.
Donna Tartt
I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.
Lauren DeStefano
This is the secret that none dares tell who fights for a cause. Dying, we are all alike.
Jacqueline Carey
We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.
Liam Callanan
At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first light of the morning. She had time to think of him on the Drop, riding Rusher flat out with his black hair flying back from his temples and his neckerchief rippling; to see him laughing with an ease and freedom he would never find again in the long life which stretched out for him beyond hers, and it was his laughter she took with her as she went out, fleeing the light and heat in to the silkly, consoling dark, calling to him over and over as she went, calling bird and bear and hare and fish.
Stephen King
What is this thing you call substance abuse? All I wanna do is forget and get loose.Drinking and smoking over and overWhat's so great about a life that's sober?There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.I'm tired of searching for words in the sky.All I wanna do is drink and die. Nothing is real. It's all a big lie. All I wanna do is drink and die. There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die - although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
Erich Fromm
Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.
Lauren Oliver
Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
Arthur Golden
People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can't rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right.
James O'Barr
When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.
Sherman Alexie
Not only had my brother disappeared, but--and bear with me here--a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from them on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.
John Corey Whaley
Everyone dies. It is how one lives that matters.
R.A. Salvatore
Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.
The Nightvale Podcast
Just when normal life felt almost possible - when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and the veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation.
David Wroblewski
If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you'll die a lot of times.
Dean Smith
You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.
Stephen King
Hanged"I hung myself today. Hanged? Whatever,the point is I hanged myself today and I’m stillhanging.I feel fine. Just bored. I keep hoping thatsomeone will come home and cut me downbut then I keep remembering that if I knewsomeone like that I wouldn’t be up here. Bitironic, right? Or is that not ironic? I readsomewhere that, like, anything funny is,in some way, ironic. But I don’t know if it'sfunny or not. I don’t think my brain owns“funny”, you know?I feel taller. I like that.I’ve never been away from my shadow forthis long. It had always clung to my feet,parting momentarily for a quick dive intothe swimming pool. But never for fivehours. I like it. There’s three feet of spacebetween my two and the floor.I wanted something this morning. I may bestuck. But at least I’m three feet closer to it.
Bo Burnham
Pain was good. If I hurt, it meant I wasn't dead.
Kristin Cast
Men die. It's practically what they're for.
Catherynne M. Valente
Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows.
Michael Landon Jr.
Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.
William Saroyan
This is what youth must figure out:Girls, love, and living.The having, the not having,The spending and giving,And the meloncholy time of not knowing.This is what age must learn about:The ABC of dying.The going, yet not going,The loving and leaving,And the unbearable knowing and knowing
E B White
I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.
Ursula K Le Guin
Finnick and I sit for a long time in silence, watching the knots bloom and vanish, before I can ask, 'How do you bear it?'Finnick looks at me in disbelief. 'I don't, Katniss! Obviously, I don't. I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking.'Something in my expression stops him.'Better not give in to it. It takes ten times as long to put yourself together as it does to fall apart.'Well, he must know. I take a deep breath, forcing myself back into one piece.
Suzanne Collins
The first kiss can be as terrifying as the last.
Daína Chaviano
Whatever can die is beautiful — more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. Do you understand me?
Peter S Beagle