Quotes by American Authors - Page 76

There was no other way to say it. After being heartbroken for so long, I had made myself completely numb inside. Maybe not from physical pain, but anything emotional, yes. Sexual pleasure? Numb to that, too. I’d have been a great actress. After all, I had the perfect, mind-blowing orgasm down to an art. Suppose I deserve an Oscar for that.
Jennifer Salaiz
Astley comes to my side. "Are you well?" "No," I tell him, voice hoarse. "I am not well. I am broken inside. I am broken almost all-the-way deep, and I don't know...I don't know if I can ever be unbroken, let alone well again”.
Carrie Jones
Loose and forbear!
Mark Twain
Because different cultures see a particular animal as representing a certain human virtue or vice, the use of animal imagery also allows for more colorful commentary on the human condition.
Larry Herzberg
One must not be shy where language is concerned.
Ann Patchett
Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop clerks and listened in on private conversations, realising I’d gone an entire month without hearing anyone complaint that they were “stressed out”.
David Sedaris
Music is the Universal Language that allows all people to communicate with each other.
Ellen J. Barrier
I should think a dead language would be rather boring, sociallyspeaking.
Sol Luckman
We believe that information is an enlightening agent, but I can assure you it is not. We consume information, but we can’t read. We forgot how to sit down and engage the dense layers of a text. We are so busy devouring information that we forgot how to dance with ideas. We confuse linguistic bits of data for knowledge and ideas. I can assure you, gentlemen, they are not the same. Ideas require effort and the kind of sensibility that engages the subtle layers of meaning. What the hell does information require?
R.F. Georgy
They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.
Donna Tartt
Language is a door. Words en-trance and are an entrance; they draw you in. When you read, the book you cradle disappears and the tales within unfold in your mind. Writing is a shelter of words and reading an interior adventure.
Laurie Seidler
Music is the language of the universe, which everyone, including all animals, can understand.
Debasish Mridha
We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads.So too often what passes for literary criticism is "I couldn't picture that guy", or "I liked that part", or "this part shouldn't have happened." That is, we've left language so far behind that sometimes we judge quality solely based on a story's actions.So we can appreciate a novel that constructs its conflicts primarily through plot - the layered ambiguity of a fatal car accident caused by a vehicle owned by Gatsby but driven by someone else, for instance. But in this image-drenched world, sometimes we struggle to appreciate and celebrate books where the quality arises not exclusively from plot but also from the language itself.
John Green
Those who mouth your sacred words with an accent you deem wrong annoy you more than those speaking something you cannot understand.
Thomm Quackenbush
There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perceptions, lines into infinity. If the poet lies about his vision he lies about himself and in himself; this produces a true barrier.
Lenore Kandel
The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.
Steven Pinker
Gankis lifted an arm to point at the distant shale cliffs. "And in the face of it there were thousands of little holes, little what-you-call-'ems...""Alcoves," Kennit supplied in an almost dreamy voice. "I call them alcoves, Gankis. As would you, if you could speak your own mother tongue.
Robin Hobb
Uh, she said maybe your eyes matched the Fog like a synchronous magnetic field?” “I don’t even know what language that is.
Joel N. Ross
Every problem of medicine is a problem of language, and this operation was a malapropism.
William S. Wilson
Twist a tongue, and tongue a twist how many twists can a tongue twister twist around their twisting tongue. If a tongue twister's tongue could twist, how many twists would the tongue twister's tongue twist while their tongue was a twisting.
Jazz Feylynn
She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.
Jodi Picoult
I am not sure if we are numbed to the reality of rape, but here's the sad irony. While the word rape can add an edginess to your language, talking about actual rape is taboo. I didn't know this until one of my friends was raped. Then I knew this, because I didn't want to tell anyone. If she were mugged, I would have told everyone and raged.
Christine Stockton
Twist a tongue, and tongue a twist how many twists can a tongue twister twist around the twisting tongue.
Jazz Feylynn
They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.
Zora Neale Hurston
Peace is the way, not the destination.
Shannon L. Alder
Those dear to me took fright for my safety and, perhaps, my sanity. Kings, they explained, do not walk like beggars for hundreds of miles. My response was that if a beggar could managed the feat, then why not a king? Did they think me less capable than a beggar?Sometimes I think that I am. The beggar knows much that the king can only guess. And yet who draws up the codes for begging ordinances? Often I wonder what my experience in life--my easy life following the Desolation, and my current level of comfort--has given me of any true experience to use in making laws. If we had to rely on what we knew, kings would only be of use in creating laws regarding the proper heating of tea and the cushioning of thrones.
Brandon Sanderson
Painful experiences are like scars in our minds. Some have healed and been forgotten. Others are there as a reminder of what we have been through…
James A. Murphy
The world is full of alluring, flashy and thrilling experiences, which are illusionary traps — they are paths to nowhere.
Bryant McGill
[Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
Anaïs Nin
The four most expensive word in the English language are 'This time it's different.
John Templeton
A series of books, dilapidated and faded, sit bundled together. Most of the bindings are separating from the yellowed pages, but each is at home in its battered state. Their wrinkled pages and discolored skin tell not of old age, but of a good life. These books, unlike so many others, were not just read, but revisited, loved, and experienced.
Kelseyleigh Reber
Minding his own business had been his motto living in a strange foreign country with a world-recognized social issue of failing morals.
Vann Chow
It’s the journey, not the destination, but that doesn’t make sense until you get there.
J.R. Rim
Beware of anything to do with President Obama...I speak from experience.
Steven Magee
It has been my experience that law enforcement reports are littered with fabrications, inaccuracies, omissions, fraud, fantasies and willful blindness.
Steven Magee
Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Walk the midway and hear the carnival barker.Come see the freak named after his deceased father.Come see the prince who wants to abdicate his throne.Come see the son whose name is carved on a gravestone.
Sherman Alexie
Sure, we thought the acresThat we tilled were sacred,But how could we have knownThat wheat can haunt like ghosts
Sherman Alexie
Yes, I know," Isadora said, and then read her poem, leaning forward so Carmelita Spats would not overhear:"I would rather eat a bowl of vampire batsthan spend an hour with Carmelita Spats."The Baudelaires giggled and then covered their mouths so nobody would know they were laughing at Carmelita."That was great," Klaus said. "I like the part about the bowl of bats.
Lemony Snicket
Four simple chambers.A thousand complicated doors.One of them is yours.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
Now Leroux, what think youOf this twist to the story?
E.A. Bucchianeri
The Scorpion?The Grasshopper?Which way will she go?
E.A. Bucchianeri
And now it is said of meThat my love is nothing because I have borne no children, Or because I have fathered none;That I twisted the twig in my handsAnd cut the blossom free too soon from the seed;That I lay across the fire,And snuffed it dead sooner than draft or rain.But I have turned away, and drawn myself Upright to walk along the room alone. Across the dark the spines of cactus plants Remind me how I go—aloof, obscure, Indifferent to the words the children chalk Against my house and down the garden walls. They cannot tear the garden out of me,Nor smear my love with names. Love is a cliff, A clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars, smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea Till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more, Till the rock’s heart is found and shaped again.I keep the house and say no words, the evening Falls like a petal down the shawl of trees. I light the fire and see the blossom dance On air alone; I will not douse that flame, That searing flower; I will burn in it.I will not banish love to empty rain.For I know that I am asked to hate myself For their sweet sakeWho sow the world with child.I am given to burn on the dark fire they make With their sly voices.But I have burned already down to bone. There is a fire that burns beyond the namesOf sludge and filth of which this world is made. Agony sears the dark flesh of the body,And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise Above the earth, above the sacrifice;Until my soul flares outward like a blue Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air:Free of the body’s work of twisted iron.
James Wright
Gargoyles sat on the battlements- lean they were and the same hideous damp grey as the stone. They looked at her with hollow eyes and rattled their silver chains. They had wings of bats or wings or birds, most of them, and licked their beaks or teeth with forked or double tongues. Two paced restlessly before their platforms; others whined or picked their claws or groomed their mangy fur or feathers or lizard skin or scales.
Meredith Ann Pierce
cherry reddenim tornholding closethe smell of warm
Lori Jenessa Nelson
You love meand love me notyour love is an arm of clockjoining hands with mineonly to leave me again
Lori Jenessa Nelson
I wanted you mine. I wanted me yours.
Lori Jenessa Nelson
Pina colada kisses and cocaine nipsnever lie, swear to me that this feeling is real.
Lori Jenessa Nelson
imagine the desertmothers, with hair tangledtighter than their theologyand breasts that flowed milkand mystic wisdom. theyknew how to draw the singingsigils in the sand, how to digrough and bitten fingersinto desiccated dirt for waterto wet the lips of their young.women of hips and heft, wholearned how to burnbeneath the wild and searingsun, who made loud loveagainst the star-flecked threatof night, who knew that strengthis not always a matter of muscle.imagine your ancestresses,the prophetesses of the aridlands, before these starchedtraditions and pews too hardto pray from, who bled trueritual and birthed their own fiercesouls at creation's crowning --
Beth Morey
No. Not really red,but the color of a rose when it bleeds.
Anne Sexton
LamiumMigraine dreams, jagged seams,A badge of love and pain.Or dreamy eyes, sleepy eyes,Drooping, closing, losing light.Packages scattered under the tree,Some torn open, some tied tight.Is there a heartbeat in those purple veins?Are those embryos or mouths or rosary beads?The color of my first dress, gathered with love,Fairy cups stirred with blades of grass,notes clustered on a windy score,Three blooms, three friends, alas!Grape flowers, cloud flowers, love flowers,Paper parasols upside down, a butterfly herdStopped to rest by a deep green pool.Petals small as a child's tears good-bye,Dropped stitches everywhereFrom a blanket the color of sky.
Louise Hawes
Home at six AM.Is it still a walk of shame?I was shooting porn.
Asa Akira
You tell me that yes, I can do it. I know. And I may do it, if I so choose.You tell me that no, I cannot. I say, Oh? I shall do it, since you refuse!
Richelle E. Goodrich
I dreamt of you last night,vivid and consuming andgone as I woke upfaded from memory before I had the chanceto collect and recollectEven in my dreams you are ephemeraland just outside of reach- Fleeting
Abby Rosmarin
The only time she's come close to being "known" was when she accidentally came out as bisexual during sophomore English class while talking about her favorite poem.
C.B. Lee
This is not the time to be passive. This is the time to shape, sculpt, paint, participate… the time to get sweaty, to get dirty, to fall in love, to forgive, to forget, to hug, to kiss… this is the time to experience, participate and live your life as a verb.
Steve Maraboli
Do it, Octavian” She ghosted the tips of her fingers along the hem of his shirt. “Touch me.”He growled low in his throat, his forehead dropping another inch toward her shoulder, his hair tickling the side of her face. “Be my angel, Riley, not my siren. Don’t tempt me.”Moistening her lips with a sweep of her tongue, Riley glided her fingers over his belt, tracing the strip of leather to the silver buckle in the center. She felt rather than heard his deep inhalation and the tremor that raked his powerful body. Driven by his surrender, she used two fingers to walk over the square carvings etched into his abdomen, biting her lip to stop the grin that pulled when he groaned. “I want to be both for you, Octavian,” she whispered, letting her lips brush the curve of his shoulder.
Airicka Phoenix
I know.” The two words ghosted against the skin of her neck, sending goose bumps down her spine. “But I want to touch you. I want to put my hands all over you. I want to kiss every inch of you and taste you as you come apart in my arms. I want to feel you wrapped around me with nothing but my name on your lips and the sheets a tangled mess beneath us. I want…” He exhaled heavily into her ear. “I want. I want. I want!
Airicka Phoenix
Are you throwing darts at the challenges in your life? Hoping something sticks? Try using a laser instead! Choose the biggest challenge you have and take action as focused and precise as a laser. Darts can go anywhere, lasers only go where you aim them...
James A. Murphy
Relying only on logic, on what can be factually established, may inform or intimidate, but it will rarely stir anyone into action or change.
Charlotte Beers