Quotes by Novelists - Page 115

Dont you know if you keap getting a head of your self youwl jus only fall over your self when you get to where you are going?
Russell Hoban
Yet if he had been asked… if he were happy… He would have admitted readily enough that he was uncomfortable, that he was cold, and badly fed, and venomous; that his clothes were in rags, and his feet and knees and elbows raw and bleeding through much walking and crawling; that he was in ever-present peril of life, and that he really did not expect to survive the adventure he was about to thrust himself into voluntarily, but all this had nothing to do with happiness: that was something he never stopped to think about.
C.S. Forester
Friend, when you speak this carefully I know it is because you don't know what to say.
Leonard Cohen
The bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the night silence. Issac felt strangely wakeful. He resolved, as he lay down in bed, to keep the candle alight until he began to grow sleepy; for there was something unendurably depressing in the bare idea of lying awake in the darkness, listening to the dismal, ceaseless moan of the wind in the wood. ("The Dream Woman")
Wilkie Collins
For myself I can say that, having had every good thing that money can buy, an experience like another, I could part without a pang with every possession I have. We live in uncertain times and our all may yet be taken from us. With enough plain food to satisfy my small appetite, a room to myself, books from a public library, pens and paper, I should regret nothing.
W Somerset Maugham
And so, here at the end of days, you are as you’ve always been. Willing to die. Not willing to quit
Matthew Woodring Stover
Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,--she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.
Honoré de Balzac
Dear Aspiring Writer, you are not ready. Stop. Put that finished story away and start another one. In a month, go back and look at the first story. RE-EDIT it. Then send it to a person you respect in the field who will be hard on you. Pray for many many many red marks. Fix them. Then put it away for two weeks. Work on something else. Finally, edit one last time. Now you are ready to sub your first work.Criticism is hard to take at first. Trust me, I've been there. But learn to think of crit marks as a knife. Each one is designed to cut away the bad and leave a scar. Scars prove you've lived, learned and walked away a winner. Any writer who tells you they don't need edits is lying. I don't care if they have 100 books out. Edits make you grow and if you aren't growing as a writer, you are dead.
Inez Kelley
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.", September 14, 1958)
Bernard Malamud
If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money
William Gaddis
He had in his Bronx apartment a lodger less learned than himself, and much fiercer in piety. One day when we were studying the laws of repentance together, the lodger burst from his room. "What!" he said. "The atheists guzzles his whiskey and eats pork and wallows with women all his life long, and then repents the day before he dies and stands guiltless? While I spend a lifetime trying to please God?" My grandfather pointed to the book. "So it is written," he said gently.—"Written!" the lodger roared. "There are books and there are books." And he slammed back into his room.The lodger's outrage seemed highly logical. My grandfather pointed out afterward that cancelling the past does not turn it into a record of achievement. It leaves it blank, a waste of spilled years. A man had better return, he said, while time remains to write a life worth scanning. And since no man knows his death day, the time to get a grip on his life is the first hour when the impulse strikes him.
Herman Wouk
Surely the Gods did not bring me safe through fire and sea only to kill me with a flux.
George R.R. Martin
Now you see what kind of creatures we are, Hugh. Eating things alive. That's what we do. How can you have much respect for mankind, or any belief in the social struggle?
Malcolm Lowry
In Paris, everything's for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.
Émile Zola
...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez
All the mortal world is a lethal enemy during those hours between dawn and dusk.
Anne Rice
They were both lost in cities that would not pause even to shrug
Monica Ali
I thought about the current contamination of beaches, raw sewage spilling into oceans and streams, the hole in the ozone, forests being stripped, the toxic-waste dumps, the merry plunder of mankind added to the drought and the famine that nature dishes up annually as a matter of course. It's hard to know what's actually going to get us first. Sometimes I think we should just blow the whole planet and get it over with. It's the suspense that's killing me.
Sue Grafton
Wishes are sometimes just stories that have nowhere to go.
Yvette Christiansë
She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream,--and there was no answer one could make her--there seemed to be no forgiveness for such a transgression.And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?
Joseph Conrad
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
John Fowles
My real soul...? It’s real only when it’s independent...
Ayn Rand
At the same time there was the good of the poor and the good of the rich. And the good of the whites, the blacks and the yellow races... More and more goods came into being, corresponding to each sect, race and class... People began to realise how much blood had been spilt in the name of a petty, doubtful good, in the name of the struggle of this petty good against what is belied to be evil. Sometimes the very concept of good became a scourge, a greater evil than evil itself.
Vasily Grossman
I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.
Sue Monk Kidd
A secret spoken finds wings.
Robert Jordan
It was one of those bitter mornings when the whole of nature is shiny, brittle, and hard, like crystal. The trees, decked out in frost, seem to have sweated ice; the earth resounds beneath one's feet; the tiniest sounds carry a long way in the dry air; the blue sky is bright as a mirror, and the sun moves through space in icy brilliance, casting on the frozen world rays which bestow no warmth upon anything.
Guy de Maupassant
Thus looked at from outside, these guests --in this dead-and-alive dining room, of this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town--in grey, dead winter of the deadliest part of the most deadly war in history--thus seen from a detached point of view, they presented an extraordinary spectacle.
Patrick Hamilton
... this stray little thought released in him some echo of the past, a solitary trembling note whose sound rose higher and higher in his chest, awakening inarticulate longings and, inseparable from them, a piercing, unfamiliar sorrow.
Olga Grushin
To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.
Kingsolver Barbara
After all, life is never so jolly or so miserable as people seem to think.
Guy de Maupassant
You have a mind like the rings of Saturn. A million miles wide and an inch deep.
Kim Stanley Robinson
I heard of a manwho says words so beautifullythat if he only speaks their namewomen give themselves to him.If I am dumb beside your bodywhile silence blossoms like tumors on our lipsit is because I hear a man climb stairsand clear his throat outside our door.
Leonard Cohen
Leela: Why are we listening to them? It is a waste of time.The Doctor; It is difficult to know what will be a waste of time until after the time has been wasted, by which time it is too late. So predicting what will be a waste of time is something of a waste of time. Unless it gives you pleasure of course when it probably doesn't count as a waste of time.Leela (yawning): I am sorry I did not hear what you said, Doctor.The Doctor (smiling): That was a waste of time then.
Chris Boucher
Belief in yourself is more important than endless worries of what others think of you. Value yourself and others will value you. Validation is best that comes from within.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg
without the power to concentrate thatis to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience true life is impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.
Arnold Bennett
Death accompanies us at every step and enables us to use those moments when life smiles at us to feel more deeply the sweetness of life. The more certain the end the more tempting the minute.
Theodore Fontane
I gave myself to you sooner than I ever did to any man, I swear to you; and do you know why? Because when you saw me spitting blood you took my hand; because you wept; because you are the only human being who has ever pitied me. I am going to say a mad thing to you: I once had a little dog who looked at me with a sad look when I coughed; that is the only creature I ever loved. When he died I cried more than when my mother died. It is true that for twelve years of her life she used to beat me. Well, I loved you all at once, as much as my dog. If men knew what they can have for a tear, they would be better loved and we should be less ruinous to them.
Alexandre Dumas fils
For the word "We" must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within man's soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all the evils on earth, the root of man's torture by men, and of an unspeakable lie.The word "We" is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.
Ayn Rand
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
John Berger
I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative, lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores.
Joshua Ferris
He moved now, A tiny jerk of movement, and Elissa saw what she hadn't grasped before. that his fingers showed white and bloodless against he dark blue of his jacket, that his face was so tense that skin seemed to stretch taut over the bones beneath. Then he spoke, and she realized he wasn't calm. He was violently angry."WHY, Captain?" he said, so much suppressed anger in his voice that it felt as if it would shatter something. "I would have thought the the real question was WHY NOT?
Imogen Howson
They will try to ascribe a purpose to my death, as though it were a punishment, but don’t you do so, in order that I continue to live in all the shadows of your longing. I will always be in your sleep and your wakefulness. I will be with you praying, propitiating and yearning for you, in sadness, in sorrow, in dismay and in the most profound happiness.
Mohamed Latiff Mohamed
That's your cruelty, that's what's mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it--that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved.
Ayn Rand
Justice? -You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
William Gaddis
He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover — that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it.
John Fowles
The Viscount stepped into the room. "Came to see if you was dead," he said. "Laid Pom odds you weren't."Lethbridge passed his hand across his eyes. "I'm not," he replied in a faint voice."No. I'm sorry," said the Viscount simply. He wandered over to the table and sat down. "Horry said she killed you, Pom said So she might, I said No. Nonsense."Lethbridge still holding a hand to his aching head tried to pull himself together. "Did you?" he said. His eyes ran over his self invited guest. "I see. Let me assure you once more that I am very much alive.""Well I wish you'd put your wig on," complained the Viscount. "What I want to know is why did Horry hit you on the head with a poker?"Lethbridge gingerly felt his bruised scalp. "With a poker was it? Pray ask her, though I doubt if she will tell you.""You shouldn't keep the front door open," said the Viscount. "What's to stop people coming in and hitting you over the head? It's preposterous.""I wish you'd go home," said Lethbridge wearily.The Viscount surveyed the supper-table with a knowing eye."Card-party?" he inquired.
Georgette Heyer
Pain and pleasure like light and darkness succeed each other.
Laurence Sterne
Here comes the rain again.Falling on my arms like a tragedy.Reminding me of pain, as these drops wash away the tears falling down my cheeks.
Shillpi S Banerrji
Most scars are destined long before they are experienced. Healing is however, a choice,
Shilpa Menon
I understood that the law of the world was strife; an inexorable, murderous law, which was not content with arming nation against nation but which hurled against one another the children of the same race, the same family, the same womb. I found none of the lofty abstractions of honor, justice, charity, patriotism of which our standard books are so full, on which we are brought up, with which we are lulled to sleep, through which they hypnotize us in order the better to deceive the kind little folk, to enslave them the more easily, to butcher them the more foully.
Octave Mirbeau
Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down the fence.
Carl Sandburg
The Bible is just a book. But, you choose whether to prove it's all true or nothing.
Shim Steward
Love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness.
Nadeem Aslam
Whoever wants to hide a big scandal is best to stage a small one
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The weariest night the longest day sooner or later must perforce come to an end.
Baroness Orczy
...very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group
Shirley Jackson
...his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking
George R.R. Martin
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.
José Saramago
Goo'-by, ole Bill, by-by. There you go, an' the signal o' distress roun' you, H. B. 'I'm in need of assistance.' Lord, here comes the sharks--look! look! look at um fight! look at um takin' ole Bill! I'm in need of assistance. I sh'd say you were, ole Bill.
Frank Norris