Quotes by Novelists - Page 2

Travelers prove their lack of education if they make fun of the customs and values of their hosts, and the qualities that do a person honour are many and varied.
Thomas Mann
when we are weary, we speak lovingly of dreams as if they embodied our true deisres-What we WOULD have when that which we DO have so sorely disappoints us
Anne Rice
He'd call me false and faithless and I've always had a weakness for those two words; next to cruel, they're the nicest words for a woman to hear, and not so hard to earn.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
A prince may be seen happy today and ruined tomorrow without having shown any chance in his character. For the prince who relies entirely on fortune is lost when it changes...
Neil Jordan
Who has not remarked the readiness with which the closest of friends and honestest of men suspect and accuse each other of cheating when they fall out on money matters? Everybody does it. Everybody is right, I suppose, and the world is a rogue.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day, and she would listen to every sound, spring to her feet, feel surprised that it had not come; then at sunset, always more sorrowful, she would wish the next day were already there.
Gustave Flaubert
A little space of time before time expires a little way of breath.
Algernon Swinburne
Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.
Walter de la Mare
It's just that, you know how it is in some relationships, how one of them is a little more in love. Well, it's like that with friendships. Sometimes one of them thinks they're really close, closer than they are. And the other doesn't feel that way.
Andrew Sean Greer
What constitutes the pleasure of the traveler is the obstacle, the fatigue, the peril itself. What pleasure can there be in an excursion where one is always sure of arriving, finding ready horses, a soft bed, an excellent supper, and all the comforts one can enjoy at home. One of the great misfortunes of modern life is the lack of the sudden surprise, the absence of all adventures. Everything is so well regulated, so well meshed, so well labeled, that chance is no longer possible; another century of perfection, and each one will be able to foresee, from the day of his birth, what will happen to him until the day of his death. Human will will be completely annihilated. No more crimes, no more virtues, no more physiognomies, no more originality. It will become impossible to distinguish a Russian from a Spaniard, an Englishman from a Chinese, a Frenchman from an American. People will not even be able to recognize one another, for everyone will be same. Then an immense boredom will seize the universe, and suicide will decimate the population of the globe, for the principal spring of life—curiosity—will have been destroyed forever.
Théophile Gautier
Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow. Well, perhaps you are right. Perhaps the wise spurn one to remain safe from the other, but I should rather choose to have my eyes burnt in their sockets than to have been born without.
Anne Fortier
Heaven would be Hell in no time if every cruel, selfish, vicious soul went to Heaven.
Anne Rice
There is no such mischievous nonsense in all the world as equality. That is what father says. What men ought to want is liberty.
Anthony Trollope
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her . . . but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
W Somerset Maugham
I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life
William H. Gass
A person meets thousands of different people across a lifetime, a woman thousands of different men, of all shades, and many more if she constantly passes through different parts of the world. Even so, of the many different people a person on average meets it is rare for one to fit almost immediately in harmony and general interest. For all the choices available the odds are enormous.The miracle is there to be grasped.
Murray Bail
A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.
Richard Adams
But what minutes! Count them by sensation and not by calendars and each moment is a day.
Benjamin Disraeli
We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice. But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.
Gabriel García Márquez
He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.
Gabriel García Márquez
Vodka goes well with a wintery perspective. Nothing else provokes such presentiments of falling snow except, for some, the communist seizure of the state.
Michèle Bernstein
Poor little girl. Poor little girl," Nan says, and at first I think she is speaking of the baby, perhaps it is a girl after all. But then I realize she is speaking of me, a girl of thirteen years, whose own mother has said that they can let her die as long as a son and heir is born.
Philippa Gregory
When he came back, I hid my face within my hands. He said: "Fear nothing. Who has seen our kiss? --Who saw us? The night and the moon.""And the stars and the first flush of dawn. The moon has seen its visage in the lake, and told it to the water 'neath the willows. The water told it to the rower's oar."And the oar has told it to the boat, and the boat has passed the secret to the fisher. Alas! alas! if that were only all! But the fisher told the secret to a woman."The fisher told the secret to a woman: my father and my mother and my sisters, and all of Hellas now shall know the tale.
Pierre Louÿs
The ovation roared around him. He felt nothing in particular, hardly even the embarrassment he had feared. He had to go up again—this time without Fräulein Gasteiner, and it was a little peculiar to him to hear the noise of clapping hands and the loud shouts of "Bravo". He bowed several times, turned to the door and then, just as the clapping was getting weaker, he heard a voice from slightly behind him, or to the side—he couldn't quite tell—but the words were perfectly distinct, no matter how quietly they had been said: "Poor devil!" He wanted to look around, but he felt that that would seem absurd.
Arthur Schnitzler
...the quickest, efficient, least expensive way to educate a man is to make it painful for him when he is wrong, the same as with any other animal.
James Jones
...patriotism has become a narrow offensive sentiment which as long as it lives will maintain war and exhaust the world
Henri Barbusse
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
Honoré de Balzac
Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic," Richard told me. "And anyone named Heathcliff should make you suspicious.
John Irving
It is not the ink and the paper that matter, but the hand that holds the pen.
Mark Frost
The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours, Julián, he would say. Except my dreams.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.
Edna O'Brien
A monster crosses over into the everyday world. The mortals struggle and show great courage, but it’s no use. The monster kills first the guilty, then the innocent, until finally only one remains. The Last Boy, the Last Girl. There is a final battle. The Last One suffers great wounds, but in the final moment vanquishes the monster. Only later does he or she recognize that this is the monster’s final trick; the scars run deep, and the awareness of the truth grows like an infection. The Last One knows that the monster isn’t dead, only sent to the other side. There it waits until it can slip into the mundane world again. Perhaps next time it will be a knife-wielding madman, or a fanged beast, or some nameless tentacled thing. It’s the monster with a thousand faces. The details matter only to the next victims.
Daryl Gregory
The only certainty is death.
Guy de Maupassant
I have more concern for my nephew's welfare than for Lannister pride.
George R.R. Martin
[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.
Thornton Wilder
People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear
Ayn Rand
So do not waste my time. It is the most precious thing I have, time. It is the most precious thing any of us have.
George R.R. Martin
Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon.
Joseph Bruchac
I understood that I was suffering because I couldn't make anyone else around me feel better.
Muriel Barbery
There werethings, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only hehad lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot--he forgot. The lighthad destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distantshadows.
Joseph Conrad
Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman's hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?
George R.R. Martin
He led her back to the house, the perfume from the acacia clinging to her. The djinn was supposed to live in the scent of the acacia blossom, making themselves visible only to the young in order to entrap them in otherworldly world.
Nadeem Aslam
Disease could wipe out an army quicker than any battle.
George R.R. Martin
If someone offers him enough gold, it becomes a toss of the dice, and not even Mat Cauthon could say how they’ll land.
Robert Jordan
There, sitting cross-legged on the floor, he stared absently at his legs. They began to look strange. They no longer seemed to grow from his trunk at all, but rather, completely unconnected, they sprawled rudely before him. When he got this far, he realized something he had never noticed before—that his legs were unbearably hideous. With hair growing unevenly and blue streaks running rampant, they were terribly strange creatures.
Sōseki Natsume
A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
Bernard Malamud
Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.
Ayn Rand
doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time,
José Saramago
Summertime. It was a song. It was a season. I wondered if that season would ever live inside of me.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.
Honoré de Balzac
...when the petals fallSay it is beautiful and good, say it is well
May Sarton
A man is never so vulnerable in a battle as when he flees," Lord Eddard has told Jon once. "A running man is like a wounded animal to a soldier. It gets his bloodlust up.
George R.R. Martin
There's no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven't got a job. All other things depend on work today.
Nevil Shute
The only truth is that we cannot speak the truth . The only acceptable viewpoint is that we cannot express a viewpoint.
Murong Xuecun
Do they hate the idea of her, because she's different from them, and that in this difference there might be some sort of inferiority or superiority that is hers or theirs, that in the end threatens the potential happiness of everyone?
Steven Galloway
People like you and me, we have too many nerves and not enough skin. That’s the issue. Too many nerves. Not enough skin. We feel things straight to our bones. We’re radar dishes. We take in everything and we feel everything. We feel pain that doesn’t even belong to us. We are the animal shelter of feelings. We rescue everything.
Suanne Laqueur
Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.
John Fowles
It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.
George Santayana
When the characters are really alive before their author the latter does nothing but follow them in their action in their words in the situations which they suggest to him.
Luigi Pirandello