Quotes by Novelists - Page 28

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
Honoré de Balzac
Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives—and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy.
Ayn Rand
A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue’ is the action by which one gains and keeps it. ‘Value’ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? 'Value’ presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.
Ayn Rand
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casual
John Irving
The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.
Steve Berry
If the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for then it was also important enough for them to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you've given it away you'd ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever? You're goddamn right they didn't.They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the things they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live.He ought to know. He was the nearest thing to a dead man on earth.
Dalton Trumbo
Maybe one reason I had avoided anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible.
Sue Monk Kidd
Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness—to value the failure of your values—is an insolent negation of morality.
Ayn Rand
[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Gustave Flaubert
Home gives you something no other place can... your history. Home is where your history begins.
Billie Letts
In his mind he was always leaving, always going somewhere, always doing something else.
James Dickey
A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.
W Somerset Maugham
The whole problem with people is they know what matters but they don't choose it. ~Secret Lives of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
George Santayana
She wasted and grew so thin that she no longer was a little girl, but the shadow of a little girl. The flame of her life flickered so faintly that it appeared sufficient to blow at it to extinguish it. Stas understood that death did not have to wait for a third attack to take her and he expected it any day or any hour.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Certainly the heart has always something to tell about the future to those who listen to it. But what does the heart know? Scarce a little of what has already happened.
Alessandro Manzoni
I wish that people realized how this felt every day. Why does it take a life ending to learn how to cherish each day? Why must we wait until we run out of time to start to accomplish all that we dreamed, when once we had all the time in the world? Why don’t we look at the person we love the most like it’s the last time we will ever see them? Because if we did, life would be so vibrant. Life would be so truly and completely lived.
Tillie Cole
Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.
Richard Adams
It was the smile of a man who is able to see, to know and to create the glory of existence. It was the mocking, challenging smile of a brilliant intelligence.
Ayn Rand
What chilling blows we suffer-thanks to our conflicting wills-whenever we show these mortal men some kindness.
Steve Berry
Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...
Wallace Stegner
Irony of "importance": Those who deserve, don't get it; Those who don't, get it in abundance by you.
Shivam Singh
Courage is fire and bullying is smoke.
Benjamin Disraeli
He falls quiet again and tries to understand how he can be saying these things, how it can be that his dark words are coming out into the light and yet he is still alive. At once he storms the doorway that has suddenly opened for him in the endless corridor in which he has been bumping around for years; words spill out, cut off, confused, ashamed, squeezing out.
David Grossman
We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive - survive the condemnations, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things - they look small enough sometimes too - by which some of us are totally and completely undone.
Joseph Conrad
But Mehrunnisa did not know then, would never know, by giving her blessings to this marriage she had set into progress a chain of events that would eventually erase her name from history's pages. Or that Arjumand would become the only Mughal woman posterity would easily recognize. Docile, seemingly tractable and troublesome Arjumand would eclipse even Mehrunnisa, cast her in a shadow...because of the monument Khurram would build in Arjumand's memory - the Taj Mahal.
Indu Sundaresan
He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.
Philippa Gregory
He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion.
Joseph Conrad
Solitude is obviously dangerous for people with active brains. We need men around us who have ideas and like talking. Leave us alone for any length of time, and we start filling the void with supernatural creatures.
Guy de Maupassant
We are creature of darkness and light, capable of barbarism and limitless cruelty, and also love, and laughter and the creation of the most sublime beauty. We are both these things, clearly, but which are we more of?
Mark Frost
And with distance in time it is the same as with distance in place. The imagination has its atmosphere and its sunlight as well as the earth has; only its mists are even more gorgeous and delicate, its aerial perspectives are even more wide and profound. It also transifgures and beautifies things in far more various ways. For the imagination is all senses in one; it is sight, it is smell, it is hearing; it is memory, regret, and passion. Everything goes to nourish it, from first love to literature - literature, which, for cultivated people, is the imagination's gastric juice.
William Hurrell Mallock
We are all brands. Some have been discovered, some aren’t.
Shivali Singla
No adult is without problems except a happy imbecile.
Herman Wouk
Do it now even-though your Lazy mind says, Will do later
Shinu :)
Vain mistaken mortals, who, valuing themselves on names and titles, suppose that the virtues of the mind must be attached to an empty sound, when every day's experience proves that birth is disgraced, titles rendered contemptible, and riches a curse, by the vices, meanness, and dissipation of its possessors!
Eliza Parsons
As for her, I'd forgotten her for the moment. So I shall never understand why, suddenly, bewilderingly, I was certain that everything I had imagined to be truth was false. False. Only the magic and the dream are true—all the rest's a lie. Let it go. Here is the secret. Here.
Jean Rhys
I don't think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is.
Anne Rice
The life wont follow your path. You're not God.
shivani lal
Girl or boy, we fight our battles. But the God's let us choose our weapons.
George R.R. Martin
They again kissed each other and fell asleep. The patch of light on the ceiling now seemed to be assuming the shape of a terrified eye, that stared wildly and fixedly upon the pale, slumbering couple who reeked with crime beneath their very sheets, and dreamt they could see a rain of blood falling in big drops, which turned into golden coins as they plashed upon the floor.
Émile Zola
But I am a just man, even to my enemy—and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them.
Wilkie Collins
The cigar has been smoked out, and we are the ashes.
Anthony Trollope
Sex is the physical expression of a tribute to personal values.
Ayn Rand
A man should smell of sweat, not flowers.
George R.R. Martin
It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.
Ayn Rand
August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a person's heart--now that matters. The whole problem with people--"Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't...August:...They know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters.
Sue Monk Kidd
Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.
Ayn Rand
I want history to jump on Canada's spine with sharp skates.
Leonard Cohen
Worry, my son?...I am not worried now and I never have or will. You must learn to tell worry from thought, and thought from prayer. Sometimes a light will go from your life...and your life becomes a prayer, till you are strong enough to stand under the weight of your own thought again.
Richard Llewellyn
For a brief moment I felt I was the older, the more mature."A gift of life," I responded, "if not to say, a gift of God, such as music, should not have the mocking charge of paradox leveled at it for things that are merely evidence of the fullness of its nature. One should love them.""Do you believe love is the strongest emotion?" he asked."Do you know any stronger?""Yes, interest.""By which you probably mean a love that has been deprived of its animal warmth, is that it?""Let's agree on that definition!" he said with a laugh. "Good night!"We had arrived again at the Leverkühn house, and he opened his front door.
Thomas Mann
He said: 'You don't understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said—that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too. It took us a long time to understand that in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule.
Amitav Ghosh
At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet’s fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women
August Strindberg
It is a miracle if we can find true friends, and it is a miracle if you have enough food to eat, and it is a miracle if you get to spend your days and evenings doing whatever it is you like to do... Lemony Snicket, The Lump of Coal
Shirley A. Moore
Finally those you love are simply ... those you love.
Anne Rice
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.
Maxwell Bodenheim
You know how you let yourself think that everything will be alright if you can only go to certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it's not that simple.
Richard Adams
The basic dynamics of conversion are summed up for me in the words LEAVE-ARRIVE, END-BEGIN, SHED-EMERGE. These are the tensions of conversion and spiritual awakening.
Sue Monk Kidd
He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you
Gabriel García Márquez
Mind was crafted to preserve some and forget some. We have to decide when to choose delete button.
Shikha Kaul