Quotes by American Authors - Page 4

Love changes everything. I never suspected it would be so. Requited love, I should say ...
Barbara Kingsolver
My guess is (it will be) about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in search.
Craig Silverstein
You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.
Ray Bradbury
When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.
Joan Bauer
Everyone know—or at least, was probably told as a child—that you can make a wish on a shooting star. Not everyone knows that the only way to be sure it will come ture is to speak it aloud before the star disappears, and this is a nearly imposssible fet to manage.
Kate Milford
Chubi, rhymes with booby, which you don't have, or doodie, which your face looks like," she said smugly, leaning back and making her chair squeak.
Kim Harrison
But you have so much in common. You're both from strange little backwater planets. You both have odd powers. You're male and she's female. What more do you need? Believe me, buddy, if I were you, I'd go right up there and ask her if she wants to ride on my rancor.
Dave Wolverton
I'm the master of distractions. A couple of hand gestures and BAM! I'll pull the underwear clean off your butt.
Si Robertson
Si, the speed limit sign said 35. Your Goin' 55." -Sadie Robertson"Oh, that's just a suggestion.
Si Robertson
And then, on the final day, it was time for the faux Underground Railroad. This is the part that no one believes. "No adult would ever do that," they say. "You can't be remembering that right." I am, in fact, remembering it perfectly. The counselors "shackled" us together with jump ropes so we were "like slave families" and then released us into the woods. We were given a map with a route to "freedom" in "the North", which must have been only three or four hundred feet but felt like much more. Then a counselor on horseback followed ten minutes later, acting as a bounty hunter. Hearing hooves, I crouched being a rock with Jason Baujelais and Sari Brooker, begging them to be quiet so we weren't caught and "whipped." I was too young, self-involved, and dissociated to wonder what kind of impact this had on my black classmates. All I knew was that I was miserable. We heard the sound of hooves growing closer and Max Kitnick's light asthma wheezes from beind an oak tree. "Shut up," Jason hissed, and I knew we were cooked. When the counselor appeared, Sari started to cry.
Lena Dunham
There's a reason caveman started to develop sophisticated tools before the meteor wiped them all out: It's so they could fucking shave. Do you know how frustrating it must have been to be hunched over all night trying to start a fire only to finally succeed just to have your beard go up in flames? No aloe vera back then.
Ari Gold
First, if you participate in Movember, fuck you. Second, if you want to raise money for prostate cancer (a noble cause), do it the old-fashioned way, by either begging for it or exerting yourself physically for donations. Sitting on your ass and letting nature take its course above your upper lip is not the same thing as running a 10K at a local high school or breaking out the set of power tools your dad gave you as a housewarming present collecting dust in your garage and using them to go out and build a habitat for humanity. Maybe I can raise money for rectal cancer by getting people to pledge a dollar every time I take a shit. And third no one wants to see that horrific seventies pornstache growing like a caterpillar with cerebral palsy zigzagging across your face; you look like you're about to go door to door informing people that you're a registered sex offender who's just moved in next door and would their kids like to come out and was your windowless van for a dollar?Fuck Movember. And November.
Ari Gold
What are these? They look like scars." Meryn glanced down and realized he was talking about her stretch marks. Had he never seen stretch marks before?”“Those are called stretch marks.""Stretch marks? How did you get them?" "Human females get them when we grow. If we grow too fast our skin rips apart and heals. It's a very painful process." Meryn lied through her teeth. There was no way she was going to discuss stretch marks after the most mind blowing sex of her life. Nope. Wasn't going to happen. Aiden's expression became reverent."Human females are amazing creatures, you endure so much pain yet are so fragile." He kissed each shiny line.I'm going to hell.
Alanea Alder
But what really won me over was his butt. What finally made it impossible for me not to like the man was how right out there on the Adventist basepaths, right in front of eighty or ninety of the kind of pious adult spectators who spent their every Sabbath if not their entire lives trying to forget the existence of things like butts, Beal's buns were trying to light a fire by friction inside his jeans; they were gyrating like a washing machine with its load off balance; they were thrashing against his pants like two big halibut against the bottom of a boat. And the wonderful thing, the amazing thing, was how once his older audience got over the shock of it, they began to look amused at, then fascinated by, and finally downright grateful toward his writhing reminder that yes, buns did exist, and yes, every one of us owned not one but two of the things, and yes, like the God who created them in His Image, they did indeed move in mysterious ways.
David James Duncan
The only good thing was that by midnight, even most of the bums had gone home to sleep it off. That was lucky for them, because Ray was the worst damn driver I’d ever seen. And that was after I jerked his head out of the duffel and parked it on the dashboard.“Gah! That makes it worse!” he told me, as I tried to get the eyes facing forward.“How can it possibly be worse?”“Because I got double vision now! Get it off! Get it off!”He batted at his own head and succeeded in sending it tumbling into Christine’s lap. She immediately went into hysterics and slapped it away. The head fell out of the car; Ray hit the brakes and we came to a screeching halt.“What are you doing?” I screeched, as he hopped out. “There are people firing at us!”“Tough!” came from somewhere under the car.
Karen Chance
Where will we go?""I hear hell is particularly nice at this time of year.
Sarah J Maas
Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels.
Theodore Roosevelt
You were like reading a good novel. The kind were you wanted to turn every page, & never put it down... And absorb every second. But for whatever reason, that novel isn't there for me to read, & so, it's endless chapters are gone from my reach. And I don't dare to pretend to be surprised. But I do dare to wonder why.And though it's gone, I smile because it was the best novel I ever read. In those brief moments the novel of you possessed me, mind, body, & soul alike. I felt joy & adoration in such a degree, that if I never do again it'll be okay. When you read a great novel, you never forget it. And you never let go of the feeling of it in your mind. The captivating nature of it. But greater than a novel, not mere words on a page, but a reality. Reality in a vivid form that can't begin to be put into words. That words, could not touch.You're the kind of novel one would desperately want to finish. To keep near at hand & close at heart. But it can't be. And though it's a mournful & somber thought, there's enjoyment in the knowledge that for a brief moment in time, it was there. The novel of her, was a novel of breathtaking wonder. And if I never get to read another page, I'll cherish those I had the privilege of reading. And you can only hope that whoever reads it next, values it in the way you so know is deserved.
Trevor Driggers
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casual
John Irving
What is this place?" "Nothing at all. Everywhere there is. Both at once?" Wereberry offered.
Adam P. Knave
Lethargy. It's a word I know, because it's in one of my father's favorite expressions. Lethargy breeds lethargy. It means the more you lie around doing nothing, the more you want to lie around doing nothing. Your limbs and your mind feel so heavy that it becomes a major effort just to lift your arm to channel surf.
Neal Shusterman
Lucien kept rubbing at his temples as he ate, unusually silent, and I hid my smile as I asked him, “And where were you last night?”Lucien’s metal eye narrowed on me. “I’ll have you know that while you two were dancing with the spirits, I was stuck on border patrol.” Tamlin gave a pointed cough, and Lucien added, “With some company.” He gave me a sly grin. “Rumor has it you two didn’t come back until after dawn.”I glanced at Tamlin, biting my lip. I’d practically floated into my bedroom that morning. But Tamlin’s gaze now roved my face as if searching for any tinge of regret, of fear. Ridiculous.“You bit my neck on Fire Night,” I said under my breath. “If I can face you after that, a few kisses are nothing.”He braced his forearms on the table as he leaned closer to me. “Nothing?” His eyes flicked to my lips. Lucien shifted in his seat, muttering to the Cauldron to spare him, but I ignored him.“Nothing,” I repeated a bit distantly, watching Tamlin’s mouth move, so keenly aware of every movement he made, resenting the table between us. I could almost feel the warmth of his breath.“Are you sure?” he murmured, intent and hungry enough that I was glad I was sitting. He could have had me right there, on top of that table. I wanted his broad hands running over my bare skin, wanted his teeth scraping against my neck, wanted his mouth all over me.“I’m trying to eat,” Lucien said.
Sarah J Maas
A country is judged by the actions at the top. Such is the way across the world. Nations are judged by their rulers, and not by those that live within the borders.
Cheryl Matthynssens
What kind of country has this become? Decent people can’t do anything without being watched.
Dan Groat
In our opinion, Coke is great from a can, still good from a bottle, yet hard to get just right from the fountain. But oh, when they do get it right, it tastes good enough to be an eighth wonder of the world.
Alecia Whitaker
God is calling you to change the world one life at a time and one small step at a time. Begin today where you are.
Dillon Burroughs
Be proactive not reactive, for an apparently insignificant issue ignored today can spawn tomorrow's catastrophe.
Ken Poirot
Maybe it’s us who are the psychosis of some massive, all-knowing globule of nebulous space junk.
T. K. Decker
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion.
Eric Hoffer
Bertrand Russell declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, "Sir, you did not give us enough information." I would add to that, "All the same, Sir, I'm not persuaded that we did the best we could with the information we had. Toward the end there, anyway, we had tons of information.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven. The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.
Dan Brown
I tend to like strong female characters. It just interests me dramatically. A strong male character isn't interesting because it has been done and it's so cliched. A weak male character is interesting: somebody else hasn't done it a hundred times. A strong female character is still interesting to me because it hasn't been done all that much, finding the balance of femininity and strength.[From a 1986 Fangoria interview]
James Cameron
All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists," as one feminist explained.
Jill Lepore
While men had the right to obey their biological urges, women had to suppress theirs until the perfect moment. From television, movies, books, magazines, my peers, and even some of my relatives, I was taught that if a woman allowed a man to penetrate her too soon, she was too easy of a conquest for him. He would move on to pursue greater challenges after he was finished using her body to relieve his sexual urges. If the woman waited too long to let the man enter her body, she was a prude and the man would eventually give up on her. Women needed to time this process perfectly so that she could “keep” a man in her life at all times.It was the man’s goal to catch the woman and the woman’s goal to keep the man.
Maggie Georgiana Young
No, no, my good knight, do not fear for me. The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons, don't you see? Don't you SEE?
George R.R. Martin
The Girl Scouts allow homosexuals and atheists to join their ranks, and they have become a pro-abortion feminist training corps. If the Girl Scouts of America can't get back to teaching real character, perhaps it will be time to look for our cookies elsewhere.
Hans Zeiger
There's also a possibility that the landlord is in there right now, wearing women's undergarments. Or a drug addict is inside stealing jewelry.Or a boatload of recent Chinese immigrants without a television watching Russia play Finland in hockey and placing bets over beer. You have no idea what's behind that door. You can't just pick the options within your field of vision. Reality comes from everywhere. At best, you can narrow down the likelihoods. But in the end, it's not a matter of deduction. It's a matter of fact. One bullet will kill you if you're stupid or unlucky. So at least don't be stupid
Derek B. Miller
What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities?
Yoon Ha Lee
what a sad pair we are," she said. "Surely we can manage a conversation on a topic other than our respective terrible evenings.
Julia Quinn
Why is it women can never let a man have any fun, they just want to fuss about something.” “They’re practical” Austin said, shaking off some of the water droplets from his hair. “We live in the moment and they think about what’s coming. If they didn’t keep us in check, we’d fuck up the planet”.
Dannika Dark
I cherish genuine conversation, where people actually care what someone else has to say.
Charles F. Glassman
I've been talking to myself a lot lately. I don't know what that's about, but my mother was the same way. She hated to make small talk with other people, but get her into a conversation with herself and she was quite the raconteur. She would tell herself a joke and clap her hands together as she let out a laugh; she would murmur to the plants as she watered them, and offer encouragement to the food as she cooked it. Sometimes I would walk into a room and surprise her as she was regaling herself with some delightful story, and I remember how the sound would dry up in her mouth. She stood there, frozen in the headlights of my teenage scorn.
Dan Chaon
Can I get a lock for my tent?Bears can't unzip tents, Lana.Well, chainsaw psychos who wander the woods looking for young girls all alone to chop up into pieces can.There are no chainsaw psychos! I can't believe you've never been camping. It's safe, Lana. I promise.Easy for you to say. You'll be snuggled up safely in the arms of Beau Vincent. I'm more than positive he could take on a black bear.
Abbi Glines
Betsy liked to talk. Her father always said she got it from her mother, and her mother always said she got it from her father. But whomever she got it from she was certainly a talker.
Maud Hart Lovelace
It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers.
Aimee Bender
A good conversation always involves a certain amount of complaining. I like to bond over mutual hatreds and petty grievances.
Lisa Kleypas
When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece.Ford replied,''Produce it anyway.
Henry Ford
A club hurts the flesh, but evil words hurt the bone. -Traditional Chinese Proverb
Matthew Polly
Always find the funny.
Amy Susan Crohn
An undergraduate researching the "witch hunt" cases asked for evidence that there had been more than one hundred cases, noting that the major lists of such cases added up to about fifty. There was no reply that provided documentation to support the claim.[34] The members of the list were generally strong proponents of the witch-hunt narrative. They knew the answer to the question “Is there a child sex abuse witch hunt?” These “witch hunters,” as those on this list soon came to describe themselves, were increasingly activists who used the internet to exchange information and ideas. Jonathan Harris may have done more than anyone else to disseminate the witch-hunt narrative in the mid 1990s and beyond.[35]
Ross Cheit
In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them.I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.
Lundy Bancroft
While some accused and convicted child molesters have inappropriately influenced the media, the public, and many in the clinical and legal professions by claiming that traumatic amnesia does not occur in child sexual abuse, workers in the field of trauma psychology have accumulated solid empirical evidence over the past 100 years that it does occur and is common. Its existence and natural history are documented throughout the clinical literature. from:Traumatic amnesia: The evolution of our understanding from a clinical and legal perspective, Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment & Prevention, Volume 4, Issue 2, 1997
Charles L. Whitfield
As long as fathers rule but do not nurture, as long as mothers nurture but do not rule, the conditions favoring the development of father-daughter incest will prevail.
Judith Lewis Herman
For many people, the shock of sexual abuse pales before the shock of this mother’s statement, “I wish the fuck I never had her.” So thoroughly is motherhood sentimentalized that the mother who wishes to be rid of her child is considered a monster. In reality, women have always greeted the burden of motherhood ambivalently, even in the best of circumstances, and many women bear children involuntarily. But the approbrium which attaches to any woman who willing gives up her child is so great that some mothers will keep and mistreat their children rather than admit that they cannot care for them. Sometimes, the revelation of maternal neglect constitutes a plea for outside intervention, signaling the fact that a mother wants to be relieved of the duty to care for her child.
Judith Lewis Herman
Eighty two percent of the traumatized children seen in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network do not meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD.15 Because they often are shut down, suspicious, or aggressive they now receive pseudoscientific diagnoses such as “oppositional defiant disorder,” meaning “This kid hates my guts and won’t do anything I tell him to do,” or “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” meaning he has temper tantrums. Having as many problems as they do, these kids accumulate numerous diagnoses over time. Before they reach their twenties, many patients have been given four, five, six, or more of these impressive but meaningless labels. If they receive treatment at all, they get whatever is being promulgated as the method of management du jour: medications, behavioral modification, or exposure therapy. These rarely work and often cause more damage.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
Hello, Rylan,"Ivy greets me. Even with her transformation, her voice still has that magical quality about it. Her white arms wrap me in a hug, which I return. Throughout the room, I can hear disappointed sighs; the crazy-hot babe is taken.
Colleen Boyd
His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.
Janet Fitch
When Jackson used that particular tone of voice, men died, pure and simple.
Christine Feehan
Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.
George Packer
I wish politicians the world over would stop claiming credit for economic growth that happens despite them, not because of them. Grow up...
Ziad K. Abdelnour