Quotes by Novelists - Page 3

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
Ayn Rand
The man up there raged aloud in two languages, and with a sincerity in his fury that almost convinced me I had, in some way, sinned against the harmony of the universe
Joseph Conrad
Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages
Elias Canetti
Nynaeve shook her head. She supposed it was one way to find money for the poor. Simply rob anyone who was not poor. Of course, that would just make everyone poor in the end, but it might work for a time
Robert Jordan
We've all had our moments of weakness, and if we manage to get through today without any, we'll be sure to have some tomorrow.
José Saramago
At most, a hundred paces separated him from them. The powerful beast, seeing the riders and horses, rose on his fore paws and began to gaze at them. The sun, which now stood low, illuminated his huge head and shaggy breasts, and in that ruddy luster he was like one of those sphinxes which ornament the entrances to ancient Egyptian temples.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Honor is kind of what you get when you weaponize manners
Jasper Fforde
I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is.
Ayelet Waldman
Go forth my sex beast...to his virginity
shinba rize
This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.
Laurence Sterne
War hath no fury like a non-combatant.
Charles Edward Montague
People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
W Somerset Maugham
At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.
Gustave Flaubert
I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.
Kinky Friedman
Miles smiled. "Can you keep a secret?"Bea snorted. "Did I tell you what you were in for if you married my daughter?""No," Miles conceded."Well, then," she said, as if that settled the matter.
Richard Russo
All but one of Zoe Pendergraft's friends were dead.
India Drummond
Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.
Ayn Rand
One is either an artist or one is not. It is not something one becomes. It is something that one is from birth. We do not study to be artists. We study to become more proficient. To understand more.
Edward Swift
The announcer, in milky tones, rolled out the commercial; it was all about some sort of washing powder that made laundry days a mere frolic in the backyard
Ruth Park
A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I clap my hands together. (Where do I get the strength, the burst of energy?) To chase away the ghosts. Dispel my fears. Arrange the dream. Maintain a kind of balance
Anne Hébert
Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men.
Gustave Flaubert
If you behave as if you are all right, then one day you will be. You have to go through the motions of surviving in order to survive.
Nicci French
There are one or two people - I’m not talking about family, about Zhenya or your mother - whom a pariah can trust. He can contact these people without first waiting for a sign.
Vasily Grossman
No man can bear a child's cross.
François Mauriac
Without heroes we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
obsession either boosts up feeling orjust blow it off . . .
shivangi lavaniya
Life shifting, as life does
Luis Alberto Urrea
I am the only real truth I know.
Jean Rhys
Love came from all directions. On paper, on screens, in dishes and words and deeds. We’re thinking of you every minute.I’m sorry.We’re sorry.We’re so sorry…
Suanne Laqueur
I feel the life slipping out of me. When the pain comes, I cry out, but there is no prayer in it, only fear. I kneel and recite my office and the Rosary but the words are empty - dry gourds rattling in the silence. The dark is terrible and I feel so alone. I see no signs but the symbols of contradiction. I try to dispose myself to faith, hope and charity, but my will is a blown reed in the winds of despair.
Morris West
Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time
Anne Michaels
I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom.”“You call that freedom?”“To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.
Ayn Rand
Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway.
George Santayana
Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
Edna Ferber
... history - the lamp which illumines national character...
Lawrence Durrell
Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
Joseph Conrad
Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.
Ayi Kwei Armah
All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love -- I scarcely dare say it -- but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long?
Thornton Wilder
A desire to choose the hardest might be a confession of weakness in itself.
Ayn Rand
I did not come into this Army to serve one man, to serve a friend.
Jeff Shaara
The surgeon tells me that you're a sorcerer," Pym said. "Is that so?"Jaki looked to the captain with the glare of the masts in his eyes. "Yes."Pym weighed this disclosure. "You speak with the dead?""Yes."The captain's eyes screwed up intently. "What do they say to you?""They don't talk back."Pym and Mister Blackheart laughed in unison...The captain said, "Mister Blackheart wants to know what kind of sorcerer you are."Jaki pondered a response and finally said, "I was learning to catch souls before my teacher was killed.""Souls, eh? And what do you do with them after you catch them?""I put them back in their bodies.""Ah, then you're telling us you're a surgeon.
A.A. Attanasio
Huxley: "Tell me something Bryce, do you know the difference between a Jersey, a Guernsey, a Holstein, and an Ayershire?"Bryce: "No."Huxley: "Seabags Brown does."Bryce: "I don't see what that has to do..."Huxley: "What do you know about Gaelic history?"Bryce: "Not much."Huxley: "Then why don't you sit down one day with Gunner McQuade. He is an expert. Speaks the language, too."Bryce: "I don't..."Huxley: " What do you know about astronomy?"Bryce: "A little."Huxley: "Discuss it with Wellman, he held a fellowship." Bryce: "This is most puzzling."Huxley: "What about Homer, ever read Homer?"Bryce: "Of course I've read Homer."Huxley: "In the original Greek?"Bryce: "No"Huxley: "Then chat with Pfc. Hodgkiss. Loves to read the ancient Greek."Bryce: "Would you kindly get to the point?"Huxley: "The point is this, Bryce. What makes you think you are so goddam superior? Who gave you the bright idea that you had a corner on the world's knowledge? There are privates in this battalion who can piss more brains down a slit trench then you'll ever have. You're the most pretentious, egotistical individual I've ever encountered. Your superiority complex reeks. I've seen the way you treat men, like a big strutting peacock. Why, you've had them do everything but wipe your ass.
Leon Uris
But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.
May Sarton
What lurked beneath my fancy frills, behind my quiet unquestioning eyes? Who was I? Had I no remembrance of a warmer flame than that which gave its wintry glow to my faint smile at those who asked it of me? I remembered no one who had ever lived and breathed within my quietly moving form~ The Vampire Armand
Anne Rice
I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn't like feeling like that.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
Robert Graves
History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past
Hilary Mantel
Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors...
Joseph Conrad
Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned.His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it…Life is the reward of virtue- and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy- a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your won destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but using your mind’s fullest power.Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seek nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing bu rational actions.The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trade…A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.
Ayn Rand
A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless.
John Fowles
Perhaps the god who had made the Cat People intended them as a joke. They had schools, but no education; politicians but no government; people, but no personal integrity; faces, but no concept of face. One had to admit that their god had gone a little too far with his little joke.
Lao She
You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.
José Saramago
They were the sort who berated a man for meddling and chased him away, then berated him again for not being there when he was needed. Not that they would admit he was needed, even then, not them. Raise a hand to help and you were interfering, do nothing and you were an un-trustworthy wastrel.
Robert Jordan
Hirota feels strongly drawn toward nature and the natural, is hyper-sensitive to the artificial—particularly that most cramped and constraining man-made creation, society—and does his best to avoid it.
Sōseki Natsume
But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.
Joseph Conrad
I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows... Or it would be fine to confirm the odd beliefs about war: it's horrible, but it's a crucible of men and events and, in the end, it makes more of a man out of you.But, still, none of these notions seems right. Men are killed, dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are afraid and often brave, drill sergeants are boors, some men think the war is proper and just and others don't and most don't care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.
Tim O'Brien
They’re like chocolate-chip cookies, though. Can’t have just one.
Steve Berry
The greatest tragedy of life is not that men perish but that they cease to love.
W Somerset Maugham
Unfinishedness avoids the stupidity of conclusions
Pierre Senges