Quotes by Novelists - Page 119

What Waringa tried hard to avoid was looking at the pictures of the walls and windows of the church. Many of the pictures showed Jesus in the arms of the virgin Mary or on the cross. But others depicted the devil, with two cow-like horns and a tail like a monkey's, raising one leg in a dance of evil, while his angels, armed with burning pitchforks, turned over human beings on a bonfire. The Virgin Mary, Jesus and God's angels were white, like European, but the devil and his angels were black.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
At best, love is simply the slipping of a hand in another's, of knowing you are where you belong at last, and of exchanging through the eyes that all-consuming regard which ignores everybody else on earth.
Laurie Lee
Here they have no time for the fine gracesof poetry, unless it freely growsin deep compulsion, like water in the well,woven into the texture of the soilin a strong pattern.
Iain Crichton Smith
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen
Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.
Thomas McGuane
That's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.
Kim Stanley Robinson
I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.
Edmund Wilson
Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
John Irving
Our power comes from the earth
Luis Alberto Urrea
To say "I love you" one must know first how to say the "I".
Ayn Rand
Feelings are like chemicals, the more you analyze them the worse they smell.
Charles Kingsley
Are you saying,” he asked slowly, “that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?”“Of course.”“That’s not the reaction of most people to being wanted.”“It isn’t.”“Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.”“I feel that others live up to me, if they want me....
Ayn Rand
The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.
Ben Lerner
Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?''For fun?''Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.
John Fowles
The erotic state – again, a mixture of concentration and spontaneity – is a hypnoidal state, probably the most powerful kind that we are capable of experiencing, and it is in this condition that unexpected regions of the self are revealed, as the majority of people know from experience.
Peter Redgrove
Them Frenchies!’ ‘Unchristian, that’s what I call ’em,’ responded Mr. Stubbs severely. ‘I fair compassionate that wench.
Georgette Heyer
England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist.
Hilary Mantel
Forgetting: that, too, was the heart's slow way of healing, but it could only be done alone. Love and loss turns us into the most solitary of creatures, their mysteries can never entirely be shared.
Eric Gamalinda
... Corellian curses being a synergistic blend of vulgarity, obscenity, and outright blasphemy that were the only things really worth saying when one was in the middle of being blown to monatomic dust.
Matthew Woodring Stover
I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't do anything but think about him. At night I dream of him, all day I wait to see him, and when I do see him my heart turns over and I think I will faint with desire.
Philippa Gregory
When something has been perfect there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it.
Edna O'Brien
Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano José had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards.
Gabriel García Márquez
The Lord has made us to be creative, and the sense of achievement will help to lift our spirits.
Shirley Corder
Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.
Ben Lerner
Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it. I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch. - Captain Roque Carnicero
Gabriel García Márquez
I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country, that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black, has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.
Gustave Flaubert
They walked off on the earthy path, laughing not quite naturally, for they could hardly help being pleased by the momentary attention of descending passengers and by their own almost meritorious youth.
Shirley Hazzard
Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.
Georges Simenon
Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.
Alphonse de Lamartine
Eventually you can't help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.
Imogen Binnie
Only Certain offered no enticements, for she knew nothing could ease the pain. Not books or photography or food. Not even love.
Billie Letts
Your memory is a monster; you forget -it doesn't. It simply files thingsaway. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
John Irving
Friendship is genuine when two friends can enjoy each others company without speaking a word to one another.
George Ebers
The Sun never sets. It is we who rise think to shine.
Earle Birney
Victory and defeat are but ordinary events in a soldier's career, and why should you give up?
Luo Guanzhong
If there is anything in writing that comes easy for me it's making up metaphors. They just appear. I can't move two lines without all kinds of images. Then the problem is how to make the best of them. In its geological character, language is almost invariably metaphorical. That's how meanings tend to change. Words become metaphors for other things, then slowly disappear into the new image. I have a hunch, too, that the core of creativity is located in metaphor, in model making, really. A novel is a large metaphor for the world.
william gass
Sometimes, pain is all that lets you know you're alive.
Robert Jordan
Of necessity she went further in aversion than she had gone in love, for her hatred was not in proportion to her love but to her disappointed hopes.
Honoré de Balzac
And so I learned what solitude really was. It was raw material - awesome, malleable,older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless - for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself.
David James Duncan
It was one of those moments that no scientist can ever reduce to numbers, try as she might.
Anne Fortier
How could you receive a member of the Male Sex in your bedroom, and in your dressing gown?Sir, I must request you to leave immediately!""You don't mean to tell me that's a dressing gown?" interrupted Mr Carlton, a dangerous gleam in his eyes." Well, it's by far the most elegant one I've ever been priviledged to see, and I suppose I must have seen scores of 'em in my time-paid for them too!
Georgette Heyer
Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams.
Murasaki Shikibu
Have all beautiful things sad destinies?
Jean Rhys
Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for peace at any price? Or the ones who pretend they don't see what's going on around them? The world belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing.
Joseph Conrad
If we repay evil with good, then how do we repay the good?
Henryk Sienkiewicz
For it is discomfort's own essence to be near a man and to feel him in torture of misery, to feel with him the very pain of the misery, and yet to be unable to help.
Richard Llewellyn
I have given my word that only death will take me from you.
Philippa Gregory
Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves or you will never find it.
Bertha von Suttner
God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world
Gustave Flaubert
Nature loves death: she will not punish it.
Guy de Maupassant
The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
Thornton Wilder
I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only think I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through t something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.
Sue Monk Kidd
Perhaps the perusal of such works may, without injustice, be compared with the use of opiates, baneful, when habitually and constantly resorted to, but of most blessed power in those moments of pain and of langour, when the whole head is sore, and the whole heart sick. If those who rail indiscriminately at this species of composition, were to consider the quantity of actual pleasure it produces, and the much greater proportion of real sorrow and distress which it alleviates, their philanthropy ought to moderate their critical pride, or religious intolerance.
Walter Scott
You are the Perfect Young Man: honest, clean, virile.
Edmund White
God promises to hear and answer our prayers, but he doesn't always answer the way we want him to.
Shirley Corder
The people can be forced to fear, but not to love.
Steve Berry
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level
Gustave Flaubert