Quotes by Novelists - Page 23

Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.
Wallace Stegner
It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.
W Somerset Maugham
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean Genet
Be careful you don't cut yourself. The edges are sharp enough to shave with.''Girls don't shave', Arya said.'Maybe they should. Have you ever seen the septa's legs?
George R.R. Martin
I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.
Leonora Carrington
What separated the living from one another could be as impenetrable as whatever barrier separated the living from the dead.
Joshua Ferris
Though he plunged into work as another man might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love.
May Sinclair
Can't you see there's a determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run.
Malcolm Lowry
A mere wilderness, as you see, even now in December; but in summer a complete nursery of briers, a forest of thistles, a plantation of nettles, without any live stock but goats, that have eaten up all the bark of the trees. Here you see is the pedestal of a statue, with only half a leg and four toes remaining: there were many here once. When I was a boy, I used to sit every day on the shoulders of Hercules: what became of him I have never been able to ascertain. Neptune has been lying these seven years in the dust-hole; Atlas had his head knocked off to fit him for propping a shed; and only the day before yesterday we fished Bacchus out of the horse-pond.
Thomas Love Peacock
Your fear is, that if you marry Adèle, you will love her. If you have children, you will love them more than anything else in the world, more than patriotism, more than democracy. If your children grow up, and prove traitors to the people, will you be able to demand their deaths, as the Romans did? Perhaps you will, but perhaps you will not be able to do it. You’re afraid that if you love people you may be deflected from your duty, but it’s because of another kind of love, isn’t it, that the duty is laid upon you?
Hilary Mantel
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
John Berger
I think I possess because I do not try to give,Trying to give, I see that I have nothing.
René Daumal
Nothing was ever normal again.Many lives change like that -- all of a sudden, and forever.
Kim Stanley Robinson
I CAN'T GO ON! I FEEL LIKE NONE OF MY EMOTIONAL WOUNDS CAN HEAL! AS SOON AS IT TRIES TO HEAL, IT SHATTERS AGAIN! I CAN'T HEAL!
Shine
I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker’s head if they’re not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it’s bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God’s face when it’s bitter
Gustave Flaubert
So time passed on. And the two skyscrapers decided to have a child. And they decided when their child came it should be a *free* child. "It must be a free child," they said to each other. "It must not be a child standing still all its life on a street corner. Yes, if we have a child she mist be free to run across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea. Yes, it must be a free child."So time passed on. Their child came. It was a railroad train, the Golden Spike Limited, the fastest long distance train in the Rootabaga Country. It ran across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea.
Carl Sandburg
for a woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea
Honoré de Balzac
And then the sword came down like a flash of lightning, and then her head was off her body and the long rivalry between me and the other Boleyn girl was over.
Philippa Gregory
It is very strange to think back like this, although come to think of it, there is no fence or hedge round Time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.
Richard Llewellyn
A Voltairian of good stock,” he murmured.“What is that supposed to mean?” I growled.“To believe a little in God and much in the devil!”“Well, yes, Mister Hilmacher, and if the devil is not a part in this business, let him take me to Hell!” “Mister Burgomaster, you insult the devil. He who undervalues the devil belittles God. I fail to see why the Almighty would occupy Himself with our most insignificant actions and thoughts, like a good old woman during the endless tea hours, and I would find the role of Old Nick singularly petty indeed should he amuse himself with a giant pleasantry that sends a herd and its guardians into the mortal mud of the swamp.
Jean Ray
Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff - tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets - in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone.
Walker Percy
I've learnt that solitude is sometimes a path that leads to peace
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it.
Gustave Flaubert
Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
Ayn Rand
Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth...
Wallace Stegner
I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavors. Where might I be, if I were not here? Who, what, how could I be, if I were not me, if this outward appearance that is me did not encase me, separating my consciousness from that of others who are not me? An organism—a blind, rash, pitiful eruption of the insistent assertion of the will. Far better, really, if that will were to drift free in a night without time or space, than to languish in a prison cell lit only by the flickering, uncertain flame of the intellect.
Thomas Mann
I nee to reason for a plague, ... As far as I know no comets or eclipses have been forecast, and our sins are not great enough for God to be concerned with us.
Gabriel García Márquez
Sometimes the Lord allows us to go through tough times so we learn to rely upon Him.
Shirley Corder
In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest - without asking to be paid.
Chinua Achebe
You have made a place in my heart where I thought there was no room for anything else. You have made flowers grow where I cultivated dust and stones. Remember this, on this journey you insist on making. If you die, I will not survive you long.
Robert Jordan
I must own, too, that I can't be astonished at his being vexed to death over this business. It is excessively awkward! However, he doesn't lay the blame for that at my door: you mustn't think that!""I should think not indeed!" exclaimed Anthea between amusement and indignation. "How could he possibly do so?""No, very true, my love!" agreed Mrs Darracott. "I thought that myself, but it did put me on the fidgets when Richmond said he wanted to see me, because in general, you know, things I never even heard about turn out to be my fault.
Georgette Heyer
If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.
Jasper Fforde
..it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all.
Ayn Rand
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...
Ayn Rand
The little man gave the big one a look. One of his eyes was green, one was black, and both were cool.
George R.R. Martin
What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it's only a building. It's not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture, and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it.""Isn't it?
Ayn Rand
Its important to be comfortable with uncertainty.
Xiaolu Guo
She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.
Joseph Conrad
Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land.
Walter Scott
Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.
Jasper Fforde
Men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God
John Irving
And maybe that is what it comes down to, knowing what the other person needs even before they know it themselves. Maybe it’s just that simple and it is only us who make it complicated with our anniversaries and our gifts, with grand declarations and public demonstrations, empty words and valuable stones.
Shitij Sharma
The gods are blind and men see only what they wish.
George R.R. Martin
Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
John Berger
Discussions should always be held just before going to bed, your rear protected by sleep. How painful, after an intellectual conversation, to have to go about with your mind so stirred up.
Thomas Mann
I am such a bad girl," she thought. Yet...
Anne Rice
Colonel Talbot? he is a very disagreeable person, to be sure. He looks as if he thought no Scottish woman worth the trouble of handing her a cup of tea.
Walter Scott
Forgiveness comes later in life, after you've created enough disasters of your own.
Mat Johnson
To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.
William Makepeace Thackeray
There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.
Ben Lerner
The madness of the eyes is the lure of the abyss. Sirens lurk in the dark depths of the pupils as they lurk at the bottom of the sea, that I know for sure - but I have never encountered them, and I am searching still for the profound and plaintive gazes in whose depths I might be able, like Hamlet redeemed, to drown the Ophelia of my desire.
Jean Lorrain
The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it all the past as well as all the future.
Joseph Conrad
wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
Gabriel García Márquez
The only wolves we got to fear are the ones wear manskin,
George R.R. Martin
We think of ourselves as failures, rather than renounce our belief in the possibility of perfection. We hang on to the hope of eternal love by denying even its temporary validity. It´s less painful to think 'I'm shallow', 'She's self centred', 'We couldn't communicate', 'It was all just physical', than to accept the simple fact that love is a passing sensation, for reasons beyond our control and even beyond our personalities. But who can reassure himself with his own rationalizations? No argument can fill the void of a dead feeling -- that reminder of the ultimate void, our final inconstancy. We're untrue even to life.
Stephen Vizinczey
... it's pointless to think in moral terms when everything is permissible. We have become the people we detest. We have lost the capacity to imagine what is forbidden We have been freed, in other words, from our own hypocrisy.
Eric Gamalinda
Don't let the devil hear you, minister, The devil has such good hearing he doesn't need things to be spoken out loud, Well, god help us then, There's no point asking him for help either, he was born stone-deaf.
José Saramago
Facing them (men) with knives and spears was much easier than loving them, much easier.
Robert Jordan
We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind.
Kenzaburō Ōe
It is at the family fireside, often under the shelter of the law itself, that the real tragedies of life are acted; in these days traitors wear gloves, scoundrels cloak themselves in public esteem, and their victims die broken-hearted, but smiling to the last. What I have just related to you is almost an every-day occurrence; and yet you profess astonishment.
Émile Gaboriau