Quotes by Novelists - Page 34

Roger edged past the chief, only just avoiding pushing him with his shoulder. The yelling ceased, and Samneric lay looking up in quiet terror. Roger advanced upon them as one wielding a nameless authority.
William Golding
She was surprised to find that something from deep down in herself welled into her eyes and burned her cheeks: a few poor tears shed by one who never cried!
François Mauriac
She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.
Ayn Rand
....and I gazed at these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed the immortal thoughts of the greatest shatterer of dreams who had ever dwelt on earth.
Guy de Maupassant
Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding
I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses. My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind… and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. That’s why I read so much, Jon Snow.
George R.R. Martin
Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question “What do these people have to do with us?” and “What are we doing out there in the world?
Kamila Shamsie
A revolution was inevitably coming; the earth was destined to be reclaimed, renewed and revived.
Shizette Parker
With horror he perceived that, by uniting himself as he had with the dead, he had cut himself off from the living. Stripped of all earthly hope, bereft of every consolation, he was rendered as poor as mortal can possiblybe on this side of the grave.
Ludwig Tieck
Shame was an emotion he had abandoned years earlier. Addicts know no shame. You disgrace yourself so many times you become immune to it.
John Grisham
The power of the sky can be made to do men's bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask.
Ayn Rand
My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning.Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.
Vasily Grossman
Your ego is your strictest judge.
Ayn Rand
No matter whom I'm with I'll always be alone," she said. And she added with a roguish touch: "Excellency.
Gabriel García Márquez
Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world's great diplomats, surely.
Anne Rice
After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
...and he had to have freedom-not even that, just to read and sleep in peace, without a uniform-sooner still.
Alfred Jarry
Change lays her hand not upon the truth.
Algernon Swinburne
I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.
Richard Powers
Don't you dare call me arrogant!If ever I had any at all-which I deny!- how much could I possibly have left after having been ridden over rough-shod by you and Thomas, do you imagine?
Georgette Heyer
That was a good straightforward point of view, no pretence that games were anything but an outlet for power and aggression; no stuff about their being enjoyable as such. You played a game to demonstrate that you did it better than someone else. If it came to that, I thought how few people do anything for its own sake, from making love to practising the arts.
Anthony Powell
Happiness was the responsibility you dreaded, it required the kind of rational discipline you did not value yourself enough to assume - and the anxious staleness of your days is the monument to your evasion of the knowledge that there is no moral substitute for happiness, that there is no more despicable coward than the man who deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty to life of a bird or a flower reaching for the sun. Discard the protective rags of that vice which you called a virtue: humility - learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness - and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.
Ayn Rand
Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
Gustave Flaubert
No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.
Ayn Rand
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
Ayn Rand
It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don't need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.
Wallace Stegner
What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest.
Wallace Stegner
Doubt is like a thorn you can't get a hold on.
Melanie Raabe
He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean—privet, vines, and weeds; but he waited in his rooms through the winter instead, weeping and dreaming.
William H. Gass
Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could unsettle either of us—and yet the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made us shrink alike from meeting one another alone
Wilkie Collins
I kept glancing at him and away from him, as if his green eyes were hurting me. In modern parlance he was a laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him. And I had always loved him, hadn't I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat?-Lestat
Anne Rice
A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity—or none at all—with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more.
John Fowles
Everything that isn't permitted by The Law is forbidden.
Ayn Rand
I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.
Matthew Woodring Stover
OppressionNow dreamsAre not availableTo the dreamers,Nor songsTo the singers.In some landsDark nightAnd cold steelPrevail--But the dreamWill come back,And the songBreakIts jail.
Langston Hughes
For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation.
Thornton Wilder
There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.
José Saramago
..there are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
José Saramago
(Priests) cheapjack merchants selling paradise
Jean Lorrain
Those fine eyes of hers had a disconcertingly direct gaze, and very often twinkled in a manner disturbing to male egotism. She had common-sense too, and what man wanted the plainly matter-of-fact, when he could enjoy instead Sophia's delicious folly?
Georgette Heyer
Nostalgia-- that's the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.
Tim O'Brien
This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.
Émile Zola
I am bound to furnish my antagonists with arguments but not with comprehension.
Benjamin Disraeli
Then I made her understand that, where she was concerned, I was only a poor dog, ready to die for her. But that she could marry the young man she pleased because she had cried with me, and mingled her tears with mine. ~ Erik
Gaston Leroux
She did not suspect that the Abbess was even there hovering about the house, herself estimating the stresses and watching for the moment when a burden harms and not strengthens.
Thornton Wilder
Before you contradict an old man my fair friend you should endeavour to understand him.
George Santayana
Whose destinies can be in these stars, which appear not to those who inhabit the northern regions?' said Amine, as she cast her eyes above, and watched them in their brightness; 'and what does that falling meteor portend? What causes its rapid descent from heaven?''Do you then put faith in stars, Amine?''In Araby we do; and why not? They were not spread over the sky to give light—for what then?''To beautify the world. They have their uses, too.''Then you agree with me—they have their uses, and the destinies of men are there concealed. My mother was one of those who could read them well. Alas! For me they are a sealed book.''Is it not better so, Amine?''Better!—say better to grovel on this earth with our selfish, humbled race, wandering in mystery and awe, and doubt, when we can communicate with the intelligences above! Does not the soul leap at her admission to confer with superior powers? Does not the proud heart bound at the feeling that its owner is one of those more gifted than the usual race of mortals? Is it not a noble ambition?''A dangerous one—most dangerous.''And therefore most noble. They seem as if they would speak to me; look at yon bright star—it beckons to me.
Frederick Marryat
What a thing it is to have music that plays your terrible thoughts. I imagined that one piece could drive more delicate women than myself to insanity.
Jackie Kay
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Over the wintry forest, winds howl in rage with no leaves to blow.
Sōseki Natsume
It was not for the piano-tuner to know that in this still, grey, winter-gripped dining-room, this apparent mortuary of desire and passion (in which the lift rumbled and knives and forks scraped upon plates), waves were flowing forward and backward, and through and through, of hellish revulsion and unquenchable hatred!
Patrick Hamilton
She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!
W Somerset Maugham
What a lover of words and their beauty discovers. . .is that there is literally a word for every object, material or immaterial, every relation, and every process that human beings have experienced. Because that is what words are: the crystallization in language of thousands of years of experience across numerous cultures and civilizations, each word being the most tangible flesh in which thought is tabernacled.
Charles Johnson
Everything stayed hidden […] it was all secret – known by anyone who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs Wilson endured on those Saturdays when Dumfermline lost at home(p. 83-84)
John Burnside
Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.
Thornton Wilder
I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.
Wilkie Collins
It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple
Leonard Cohen
Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.
Rémy de Gourmont