Quotes by Novelists - Page 32

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.
Thomas McGuane
I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
Gustave Flaubert
Noseless and Handless, the Lannister Boys.
George R.R. Martin
There is a strong disposition in youth, from which some individuals never escape, to suppose that everyone else is having a more enjoyable time than we are ourselves;
Anthony Powell
The mind which renounces once and forever a futile hope has its compensations in ever-growing calm.
George R. Gissing
I wish I didn’t have a heart that God wrote Sad on.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
Arnold Bennett
I'm afraid to go into myself and see what's going on in there.
Muriel Barbery
After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
Russell Hoban
The charm of your society, my Sparrow, lies in not knowing what you will say next – though one rapidly learns to expect the worst!
Georgette Heyer
My whole life has been pledged to this meeting with you...
Alexander Pushkin
The world is God's world after all.
Charles Kingsley
Ice can kill as dead as fire.
George R.R. Martin
Youth! youth! how buoyant are thy hopes they turn Like marigolds toward the sunny side.
Jean Ingelow
Jenny lacked any sense of property - she was constantly apologising to Yevgenia and asking for her permission to open the small upper window in order to let in her elderly tabby cat. Her main interests and worries centered around this cat and how to protect it from her neighbors... She fed her own rations to the cat, whom she called 'my dear, silver child' The cat adored her; he was a rough sullen beast, but would become suddenly animated and affectionate when he saw her.
Vasily Grossman
I don't like taking from anyone. I'd rather be a giver, though not for any worthy reason. It's about control, obviously. If I give, I control; if I take, I am controlled. If someone offers me something for free I am at once suspicious.
Margaret Forster
No wonder I want to be Robert Mitchum: big, strong, super-cool, with those Freon eyes of his. That's who I was pretending to be a minute ago - Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. - Ben
Ron Koertge
There's only so much room at the top of the heap. The rest of us are fill dirt.
Sue Grafton
Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.
Louis Aragón
It was in the reign of George II. that the above-named personages lived and quarrelled ; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now
William Makepeace Thackeray
It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Walker Percy
I didn't know that once you've proven yourself useful to the wrong people, you'll never be free again.
Steve Hamilton
Whether is is a good or bad deal depends, for money does not always keep its value, unlike mankind, whose value is always the same, everything and nothing.
José Saramago
Secrets are worth more than silver and sapphires.
George R.R. Martin
What worries me is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.
Gabriel García Márquez
Entering the front door, you were at once assailed by a nightmare of cheerlessness and squalor, all the sordid melancholy, at its worst, of any nest of bedrooms where only men sleep;
Anthony Powell
People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.
George R.R. Martin
Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man's reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why?
John D. MacDonald
Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling,’ he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .‘to feel’ is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality.
Ayn Rand
Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been. It had taken the one in the loyalty of love, and the other in the innocence of faith, from a world which for love has no recompense and for faith no fulfillment.
Ouida
Do you think that too," she said, "that I have slept too long in the moonlight?
Jean Rhys
Bargains, bargains, El-ahrairah," he said. "There is not a day or night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit's. Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not. But there is no bargain, for here what is is what must be.
Richard Adams
You ever want to negotiate a hostage situation in Quebec, I'm your man. Send me in for a little parley and the francophone miscreants will flee, hands over bleeding ears.
Will Ferguson
Mistakes are often the best teachers.
James A. Froude
You're fighting this war in the worst way possible." "I don't know how to fight it, Dad.""You should ask for help," he said."I don't know how to do that, either.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Stars in the night,' he said. 'Something something something something, some delight
Philippa Gregory
His attention caught, her companion raised his eyes from the book which lay open beside him on the table and directed them upon her in a look of aloof enquiry. 'What's that? Did you say something to me, Venetia?''Yes, love,' responded his sister cheerfully, 'but it wasn't of the least consequence, and in any event I answered for you. You would be astonished, I daresay, if you knew what interesting conversations I enjoy with myself.
Georgette Heyer
When they lay in bed together it was—as it had to be, as the nature of the act demanded—an act of violence. It was surrender, made the more complete by the force of their resistance. It was an act of tension, as the great things on earth are things of tension. It was tense as electricity, the force fed on resistance, rushing through wires of metal stretched tight; it was tense as water made into power by the restraining violence of a dam. The touch of his skin against hers was not a caress, but a wave of pain, it became pain by being wanted too much, by releasing in fulfillment all the past hours of desire and denial.
Ayn Rand
So spoke the man whose importance originated in the golden harvest he had reaped with the resistless hand of force, from the the legal, but unfortunate possessors, in a far distant region, where the conviction of riches proves certain destruction to the hapless natives, and poverty is considered as the greatest crime their European plunderers can possibly be accused of.
Helen Craik
Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet.
Gabriel García Márquez
And the poor lady, so small in her black satin, shrivelled up and sallow, with her funny corkscrew curls, took the little boy on her lap and put her arms around him and wept as though her heart would break. But her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.
W Somerset Maugham
Not his match! And have you not the heart in you to be anything but best? How many are his match? How many in this world do you think stand in the front rank? Are all the rest of us to give up and sit on our hands rather than serve humbly where we deserve?
Edith Pargeter
It is so rare to find someone of true understanding; for the most part they judge purely by their own standards and ignore everyone else. So all they see of me is a façade. There are times when I am forced to sit with them and on such occasions I simply ignore their petty criticisms, not because I am particularly shy but because I consider it pointless. As a result, they now look down upon me as a dullard.
Murasaki Shikibu
There are a thousand excuses for failure but never a good reason,"-Mark Twain
ShirLee McGarry
Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Only a starving man asks bread from a begger
George R.R. Martin
We'll teach it that the humblest insect measuring out its miserable days by the pug-wuggery and skull duggery of the old Slug of Time is worth far more than this defecating bubble!
John Cowper Powys
Your red dress,’ she said, and laughed.But I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now.
Jean Rhys
You are your mother's trueborn son of Lannister.""Am I?" the dwarf replied, sardonic. "Do tell my lord father. My mother died birthing me, and he's never been sure.""I don't even know who my mother was," Jon said. "Some woman, no doubt. Most of them are." He favored Jon with a rueful grin. "Remember this, boy. All dwarfs may be bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs."And with that he turned and sauntered back into the feast, whistling a tune. When he opened the door, the light from within threw his shadow clear across the yard, and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood tall as a king.
George R.R. Martin
It is wisdom to believe the heart.
George Santayana
She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, feeling no desire to move or think or know that there was any time beyond this moment.
Ayn Rand
Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
William H. Gass
The deeply secretive cannot grasp that protecting your secret too fiercely exposes it.
Kai Ashante Wilson
He's fine. He's fine,' he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down.'Why should he be unhappy?' she wanted to say. 'He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here?
Anne Enright
O what we ben! And what we come to!
Russell Hoban
It's a fathers job to spoil his daughters shamelessly, it's their husbands job to tame them. Prince Zehava-The Dragon Prince
Melanie Rawn
Caroline, beside herself, dragged me down to her, her breast was against mine, and by a circular movement seemed to caress it. The pretty strawberries which crowned her breasts, jealous at meeting others as fair, endeavoured to engage them in combat.
Felicité de Choiseul-Meuse
No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man.There can be no such thing as " the right to enslave .
Ayn Rand
The library had become her solace. Her refuge.Books did not question or judge. They made safe companions.
Inglath Cooper
What d'you suppose I care if I'm a gentleman or not? If I were a gentleman I shouldn't waste my time with a vulgar slut like you.
W Somerset Maugham