Quotes by Novelists - Page 25

Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.
Gustave Flaubert
I've heard of such a legend!' I gasped. 'A child descended from a union between Christ and Mary Magda
Mark Gatiss
I'll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!
John Irving
Men die in battle women die in childbirth.
Philippa Gregory
Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronised, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand. Later they dined at a restaurant quite near the flat.
Anthony Powell
OctoberO love, turn from the changing sea and gaze,Down these grey slopes, upon the year grown old,A-dying 'mid the autumn-scented hazeThat hangeth o'er the hollow in the wold,Where the wind-bitten ancient elms infoldGrey church, long barn, orchard, and red-roofed stead,Wrought in dead days for men a long while dead.Come down, O love; may not our hands still meet,Since still we live today, forgetting June,Forgetting May, deeming October sweet? - - Oh, hearken! hearken! through the afternoonThe grey tower sings a strange old tinkling tune!Sweet, sweet, and sad, the toiling year's last breath,To satiate of life, to strive with death.And we too -will it not be soft and kind,That rest from life, from patience, and from pain,That rest from bliss we know not when we find,That rest from love which ne'er the end can gain?- Hark! how the tune swells, that erewhile did wane!Look up, love! -Ah! cling close, and never move!How can I have enough of life and love?
William Morris
Androids were never meant to dream.
Tim Lebbon
People won't admit it, they're too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can't see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there's always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness.The black and the black and the black.
John Fowles
Don't you know there's another bubble as well? An expectations bubble. Bigger houses, private planes, yachts... stupid salaries and bonuses. People come to desire these things and expect them. But the expectations bubble will burst as well, as all bubbles do.
Edward Rutherfurd
...as vivid and fabulous as a unicorn...
Anne Rivers Siddons
To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare -- where others lack the courage-- to plunge again into the elemental.
Thomas Mann
You don't get ulcers from what you eat. You get them from what's eating you.
Vicki Baum
Dr. Wyman preached a God I couldn’t quite see in my mind, and certainly couldn’t love. I dimly pictured some kind of Grandfather, who dealt out to bad people their awful “just deserts,” which I thought must be poisoned food at the end of delicious meals.
John Hersey
Now you know what hurt it brings to women when men come into the world. Remember, and make it up to your Mama and to all women.
Richard Llewellyn
Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.
Sue Monk Kidd
Imagination, like reality, has its limits.
Tim O'Brien
Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public.
Ayn Rand
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
Ouida
Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part.
W Somerset Maugham
You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
Wallace Stegner
Every child knows its mother, Dany thought. When the seas go dry and the mountains blow in the wind like leaves.
George R.R. Martin
Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.
George R.R. Martin
There is a fine line between paranoia and sensibly caring for our already overburdened bodies.
Shirley Corder
Do you know what she did today?" He leaned confidentially across the table, pointing at the dishes in the sink. "She went to the market and left all the breakfast dishes there and said she'd do them later. I know what she wanted. She expected me to do them. Well, I'll fool her. I'll leave them just where they are.
Ayn Rand
It's what the loss uncovers in you that brings on despair, not the loss itself.
Nicci French
The king is a saint and cannot rule, and his son is a devil and should not.
Philippa Gregory
Every man paddles his own canoe.
Frederick Marryat
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
John Fowles
Dad? Dad, no. No. I can't. I can't. Why are you saying these things?""Because I can't stand watching all that loneliness that lives inside you.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation--who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him--but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope--qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.
Bill Styron
The intense thereness of it-haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs-I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That's why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this? Now, remembering Sax's odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was feeling the thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to this moment.
Kim Stanley Robinson
May your criminal enjoyments vanish as a shadow! may your ill-gotten wealth leave you without a resource; and may you yourself remain alone and deserted, to learn the vanity of these things, which now divert you from better pursuits!
Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles
There are few things in life worse than a long-winded lawyer.
John Grisham
If that’s the price of getting together, then I’ll be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can’t be punished for being good. One can’t be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we’d better start slaughtering one another, because there isn’t any right at all in the world!
Ayn Rand
Actually, you can be bad at something...but if you love doing it, that will be enough. - August Boatwright
Sue Monk Kidd
He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets ...
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
No two persons ever read the same book.
Edmund Wilson
Winter is coming.
George R.R. Martin
But in the daytime it was all right. And when you'd had a drink you knew it was the best way to live in the world because anything might happen. I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day.
Jean Rhys
The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.
Anne Michaels
You are my heart. Even if you are a broken heart
Philippa Gregory
I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion. Dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice--they all make fine fuel.
Edna Ferber
I wondered what it would be like, to love a girl, to know how a girl thinks, to see the world through a girl's eyes. Maybe they knew more than boys. Maybe they understood things that boys could never understand.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
We are the children of a womb.Yet we differentiate each other,On color, creed and the sizes of our tombs!!
Shillpi S Banerrji
In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
Ayn Rand
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
John Berger
I am terribly glad to be alive and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American with all the rights and privileges that those words connote. And most of all I am humbled before the responsibilities that are also mine. For no right comes without a responsibility and being born luckier than most of the world's millions, I am also born more obligated.
Wallace Stegner
With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.
Tim O'Brien
Yet Conscience is a nobleman, the best in us, and a friend.
Richard Llewellyn
At that period, rising in the world meant giving up working with your hands in favor of work in a store or an office. The people who lived in town had made it, and turned their backs socially on those who had not but were still growing corn and wheat out there in the country. What seemed like an impassable gulf was only the prejudice of a single generation, which refused to remember its own not very remote past.
William Maxwell
Sleep is a little death, dreams the whisperings of the other who would drag us all into the eternal light
George R.R. Martin
How came she by her death? How came she there? Was she slain by accident, or had she met with violence? were the questions that pressed upon our thoughts. But we said little then and after a time left her where we found her. It mattered not to her that the bed was hard or the air cold.("A Night In An Old Castle")
George Payne Rainsford James
Neil once told me you had to become a monster so that you didn't become the victim of one instead. I don't care what anyone says. I believe him.
Shirley Marr
Oh, the joy of the arrival of a child, which is both the one and the other, a mirror in which husband and wife, who love each other, can see each other in one single face.
Georges Rodenbach
How can you care about the image of a landscape, when you show by your deeds that you don't care for the landscape itself?
William Morris
The greatest of all human delusions is that there is a tangible goal, and not just direction towards an ideal aim. The idea that a goal can be attained perpetually frustrates human beings, who are disappointed at never getting there, never being able to stop.
Stephen Spender
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
Anthony Trollope
There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.
Robert Graves
There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had
Alan Hollinghurst
and like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring
John Fowles