Quotes by Novelists - Page 11

Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.
Gabriel García Márquez
There is a large stock on hand; but somehow or other, nobody's experience ever suits us but our own.
Letitia Landon
Very soon she'll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter. The way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh back at them. Yes, they've got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, it's a long, long line. She's one of them. I too can wait—for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie ...
Jean Rhys
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner
She could see now that some of the grime that covered him was blood. He looked to be six or seven years old. His ribs were showing and his belly sunk in towards his spine, leaving a hollow above his hips.
Shirley A. Martin
The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the more mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going onto Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24). Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common knowledge that the ChronoGuard was SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. It is rumored that SO-1 was the department that polices the SpecOps themselves. Quite what the others do is anyone's guess. What is known is that the individual operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police and slightly unbalanced. 'If you want to be a SpecOp,' the saying goes, 'act kinda weird...
Jasper Fforde
There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.
Ayn Rand
It is warm, I am alive, I am calm and sad, I hardly know why. In this existence so even, so tranquil, and so gentle as I have here, I am in an element that weakens me morally while strengthening me physically; and I fall into melancholies of honey and roses which are none the less melancholy. It seems to me that all those I love forget me, and that it is justice, because I live a selfish life having nothing to do for any one of them.
George Sand
No matter what has happened always behave as if nothing had happened.
Arnold Bennett
Consciousness is a born hermit.
George Santayana
London is a roost for every bird.
Benjamin Disraeli
You will only learn in a fight how much you've got to learn.
Richard Llewellyn
[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
Wallace Stegner
Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world always yields or if it beats you sometimes dare it again and it will succumb.
William Makepeace Thackeray
But you have to understand, mental illness is like cholesterol. There is is good kind and the bad. Without the good kind- less flavor to life. Van Gogh, Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Pink Floyd (the early Piper at the Gates of Dawn line up), scientific breakthroughs, spiritual revolution, utopian visions, zany nationalism that kills millions- wait, that’s the bad kind. Tim Dorsey (Hurricane Punch)
Tim Dorsey
He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realised that right here, on this disco floor, there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy – and all for naught. In a few years they’d all be old walruses, and in a few more, dead.
Edmund White
In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even beauty is only a vein sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of ones clothes in a community of blind men.
Joseph Conrad
Anybody who thinks there's nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. If there is a God who created this world, he should scrap it and try again.
Athol Fugard
Nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.
Benjamin Disraeli
I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.
Jasper Fforde
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
Stephen Spender
If the word frankly or sincerely is not uttered in the first ten minutes-or let us speak openly-then you are not in the presence of a genuine businessman and he will certainly go bankrupt.
Francoise Mallet-Joris
He was not crying for the pain they had caused him, nor for the humiliation he had suffered when they looked at his foot, but with rage at himself because, unable to stand the torture, he had put out his foot of his own accord.
W Somerset Maugham
And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice.“And when you do find one, observe with care,” he said to the intern:“they almost always have crystals in their heart.
Gabriel García Márquez
A benefit of friendship is knowing whom to tell secrets to.
Alessandro Manzoni
The clock sweats out each minuteof what meat is left to us.
Joseph Bathanti
I wish i could tell you what i feel for you... nothing seems right not even you... i wish i could ask him to make everything normal...
shivangi lavaniya
If your enemy offers you two targets, strike at a third.
Robert Jordan
Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else.
Ayn Rand
Please don’t preach at me—I feel bad enough already.
Shirley Corder
It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if not altogether acceptable) behavior of male writers; it would surely benefit me, as a writer, if I had the courage to seek out more of the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant myself. But women who seek out such things are made to feel ashamed, or else they sound stridently ridiculous in defending themselves -- as if they're bragging. ... Yet there are subjects that remain off-limits for women writers. It's not unlike that dichotomy which exists regarding one's sexual past: it is permissible, even attractive, for a man to have had one, but if a woman has had a sexual past, she'd better keep quiet about it.
John Irving
She sewed as she read. For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that reading was not. He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and when she read he talked.
May Sinclair
It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.
Joseph Conrad
I sit on the bed and kick off my shoes, and he kneels before me and takes the riding boots, holding one open for my bare foot. I hesitate; it is such an intimate gesture between a young woman and a man. His smiling upward glance tells me that he understands my hesitation but is ignoring it. I point my toe and he holds the boot, I slide my foot in and he pulls the boot over my calf. He takes the soft leather ties and fastens the boot, at my ankle, then at my calf, and then just below my knee. He looks up at me, his hand gently on my toe. I can feel the warmth of his hand through the soft leather. I imagine my toes curling in pleasure at his touch.‘Anne, will you marry me?’ he asks simply, as he kneels before me.
Philippa Gregory
To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?
Anne Michaels
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
George Santayana
Healing begins with owing your scars & disowning that which caused them
Shilpa Menon
DestinyThe chicken I bought last night,Frozen,Returned to life,Laid the biggest egg in the world,And was awarded the Nobel Prize.The phenomenal eggWas passed from hand to hand,In a few weeks had gone all round the earth,And round the sunIn 365 days.The hen received who knows how much hard currency,Assessed in buckets of grainWhich she couldn’t manage to eatBecause she was invited everywhere,Gave lectures, granted interviews,Was photographed.Very often reporters insistedThat I too should poseBeside her.And so, having served artThroughout my life,All of a sudden I’ve attained to fameAs a poultry breeder.
Marin Sorescu
Andrei, did you like the opera?""Not particularly.""Andrei, do you see what you're missing?""I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless.""Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful?""No. But I enjoyed it.""The music?""No. The way you listened to it.
Ayn Rand
People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another.("The Honeymoon Of Mrs. Smith" - Version 1)
Shirley Jackson
Dragons are fire made flesh.
George R.R. Martin
Blessed are you who circled desire with a blade, and the garden with fiery swords, and heaven and earth with a word.
Leonard Cohen
At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.
Ayn Rand
Most of them had not understood Blackberry's discovery of the raft and at once forgot it.
Richard Adams
A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.
Gabriel García Márquez
In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home. It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard. I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.
Anne Rice
When people go away they vanish, turn to nothing, stop being. They live only in memories, haunting the imagination.
Dezső Kosztolányi
Every time a horse let you up onto its back, it’s giving you its life. Every time.
Matthew Woodring Stover
Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?
Thomas Mann
Of course a lot of guys were ashamed. Somebody said let's go out and fight for liberty and so they went out and got killed without ever once thinking of liberty. And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose kind of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what? You tell a man he can't rob and you take away some of his liberty. You've got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It's a word like house or table or any other word. Only it's a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he's talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it? No sir anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar.
Dalton Trumbo
The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.
Wilkie Collins
I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
John Fowles
There is no greater cruelty than a genius stumbling over something idiotic.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
It is one thing to look at a mistreated boat and another to look at a tomb. The silence of the bay seemed more intense. And I could see the glint of the carrion flies.
John D. MacDonald
I think you love him more than you can bear.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A perfectly evil Devil makes even less sense than a perfect God.
Anne Rice
The glass candle is meant to represent truth and learning, rare and beautiful and fragile things. It is made in the shape of a candle to remind us that a maester must cast light wherever he serve, and it is a sharp to remind us that knowledge can be dangerous.
George R.R. Martin
A new acquaintance is like a new book. I prefer it even if bad to a classic.
Benjamin Disraeli
The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.
George R.R. Martin
Don’t you know that most people take most things because that’s what’s given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?
Ayn Rand