Quotes by Novelists - Page 46

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.
George Santayana
Give me your trust, said the Aes Sedai.On my shoulders I support the sky.Trust me to know and to do what is best,And I will take care of the rest.But trust is the color of a dark seed growing.Trust is the color of a heart's blood flowing.Trust is the color of a soul's last breath.Trust is the color of death.Give me your trust said the queen on her throne,for I must bear the burden alone.Trust me to lead and to judge and to rule, and no man will think you a fool.But trust is the sound of the grave-dog's bark.Trust is the sound of betrayal in the dark.Trust is the sound of a soul's last breath.Trust is the sound of death.
Robert Jordan
Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while you don't have the strength to fight it.
George R.R. Martin
Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.
George R.R. Martin
But then, she wonders,just what kind of man would ever give her the courage to marry at all- to overcome that dreadful fear of death that seemed always to accompany the very thought of love? It was illogical, idiotic and childish. And yet the child was with her always; and always she would be afraid unless someone could place a light down there inside that dark and chilly heart of hers and chase all the ghosts away - the ghosts of Katherine Howard, of Jane Seymour and, not least, that of her own poor mother. They accompanied her always, those spirits - especially at this kind of time, a time of being alone, of being feminine and reflective. They would all gather round to whisper in her ear and warn her - so that even as she looks up once more into her mirror she almost expects to see them there, ranged behind her shoulders, their faces full of concern and anxiety. Never trust them - never trust the men, for they will betray you always the moment you surrender to them!
Robert Stephen Parry
I would like to write a suicide note in three and a halflanguagesand travel south on a Thursday towardssome form of life outside of earth
Eric Gamalinda
Though his death would not fill me with any sense of sadness, I would probably feel the loss. Even enemies are part of one.
Jasper Fforde
If we were scars, our memories would be the stitches holding us together. You couldn't cut them apart, and if you did, it would tear you in two.""But my memories hurt," she said. "I want to forget. There's so much I just want to forget.""How are you going to do that ? Everything that's happened to you is still happening today. Once something has begun, it doesn't end. There, in your head, it never ends.
Kai Meyer
Life was like that- there would always be something scratching at the door. And whatever was scratching would just scratch and scratch until you opened the door.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Love, like fire, goes out without fuel.
Mikhail Lermontov
Son, it’s easy tae be guid oan a fu’ belly. It’s when a man’s goat two bites an’ wan o’ them he’ll share, ye ken whit he’s made o’. Listen. In ony country in the world, who are the only folk that ken whit it’s like tae leeve in that country? The folk at the boattom. The rest can a’ kid themselves oan. They can afford to hiv fancy ideas. We canny, son. We loass the wan idea o’ who we are, we’re deid. We’re wan anither. Tae survive, we’ll respect wan anither. When the time comes, we’ll a’ move forward thegither, or nut at all.
William McIlvanney
The word 'love,' used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphemy taught in our times.
Honoré de Balzac
Lem glowered. "Your lion friends ride into some village, take all the food and every coin they find, and call it foraging. the wolves as well, so why not us? no one robbed you, dog. You just been good and foraged.
George R.R. Martin
He had fought wizards (though not because he wished to), battled goblinkin (only because running hadn't been an option at the time), and faced incredible monsters (drat the luck he sometimes had when he thought about it).
Mel Odom
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Ayn Rand
Then a begging brother in a tattered brown robe said a blessing on his sword, and a maid kissed his cheek. 'They are for me,' "Why?" He asked Pate. "What am I to them?" "A knight who remembered his vows," the smith said.
George R.R. Martin
I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretence invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.
Gabriel García Márquez
And I'll dance with you in Vienna,I'll be wearing a river's disguise.The hyacinth wild on my shouldermy mouth on the dew of your thighs.And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,with the photographs there and the moss.And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,my cheap violin and my cross.
Leonard Cohen
That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
Edna O'Brien
The foreign correspondent is frequently the only means of getting an important story told, or of drawing the world's attention to disasters in the making or being covered up. Such an important role is risky in more ways than one. It can expose the correspondent to actual physical danger; but there is also the moral danger of indulging in sensationalism and dehumanizing the sufferer. This danger immediately raises the question of the character and attitude of the correspondent, because the same qualities of mind which in the past separated a Conrad from a Livingstone, or a Gainsborough from the anonymous painter of Francis Williams, are still present and active in the world today. Perhaps this difference can best be put in one phrase: the presence or absence of respect for the human person.
Chinua Achebe
How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
The moment we pass out of our habits we lose all sense of permanency and routine.
George Moore
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
W Somerset Maugham
All that really matters isto feel alive, if only for a single moment –to feel in Intense Sensationthat our existence is not an endless repetitionof sleeping, eating, drinking, and dressing.
Pietros Maneos
The secret of success is constancy of purpose.
Benjamin Disraeli
Sure, there are good things, lots, sure, blow jobs, chocolate mousse, winning streaks, the warm fire in your enemy’s house, good book, hunk of cheese, flagon of ale, office raise, championship ring, the misfortunes of others, sure, good things, beyond count, queens, kings, old clocks, comfy clothes, lots, innumerable items in stock, baseball cards and bingo buttons, pot-au-feu, listen, we could go on and on like a long speech, sure it’s a great world, sights to see, canyons full of canyon, corn on the cob, the eroded great pyramids, contaminated towns, eroded hillsides, deleafed trees, those whitened limbs stark and noble in the evening light, geeeez, what gobs of good things, no shit, service elevators, what would we do without, and all the inventions of man, Krazy Glue and food fights, girls wrestling amid mounds of Jell-O, drafts of dark beer, no end of blue sea, formerly full of fish, eroded hopes, eruptions of joy, because we’re winning, have won, won, won what? the . . . the Title.
William H. Gass
Dr. Urbino caught the parrot around the neck with a triumphant sigh: ça y est. But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in the air and then he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday.Fermina Daza was in the kitchen tasting the soup for supper when she heard Digna Pardo's horrified shriek and the shouting of the servants and then of the entire neighborhood. She dropped the tasting spoon and tried to run despite the invincible weight of her age, screaming like a madwoman without knowing yet what had happened under the mango leaves, and her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his back in the mud, dead to this life but still resisting death's final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to come to him. He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked for her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful that she had ever seen them in the half 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
Through all the ages the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter—every form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation—every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad—have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of a rational connection. Yet only to the extent to which—in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders—some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive.
Ayn Rand
That's what you get,' he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, 'when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains.
K.W. Jeter
One is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience.
George Sand
Why did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
Walker Percy
He knew that she had been dreaming that night and he knew what her dreams were about. She had forgotten them. He forebode to look at her. It gave him a grim, horrible, and rather uncanny sensation to think that a vivid, lacerating life could go on when one sunk in unconsciousness, a life so real that it could cause tears to stream down the face and twist the mouth in woe, and yet when the sleeper woke left no recollection behind.
W Somerset Maugham
Boys fight the wars. We’d have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.
Herman Wouk
My tears brought no sense of release or relief. Their flight felt like the lightest, coldest touch of a departing lover.
Anne Giardini
In his moments of pride he had said all those things, half in fun and half in earnest, and he began to wonder how he could have been so many kinds of a fool for so long without realising it.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
O miracle—thus to be able to give [peace] we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands!
Georges Bernanos
Each moment of a happy love's hour is worth an age of dull and common life.
Aphra Behn
On the whole, all people are good, or at least they're normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch.
Sōseki Natsume
Tăcerea coboară-n spiraleRotunde şi-ovale,Ca nişte confeti de-aceeaşi culoare...
Ion Minulescu
The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.
George R.R. Martin
Virtue often trips and falls on the sharp-edged rock of poverty.
Eugene Sue
Your tears come easy, when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.
Wilkie Collins
Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little After a moment he felt her turn as well and lay a hand, instinctively, like a sleeping wife, across his hips; as if, in some dream, he was the one who escaped.
John Fowles
The stomach is a slave that must accept everything that is given to it, but which avenges wrongs as slyly as does the slave.
Émile Souvestre
i asked myself "what you wanna become" she replied "everything i am
shivangi lavaniya
Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.
Gabriel García Márquez
Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.
Gabriel García Márquez
... answered his knock with a smile, a short one forced through because she was at heart a warm person, not given to the dark mood swings which now plagued her.
John Grisham
Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.
Ayn Rand
Much that may seem evil can be good.
George R.R. Martin
You know what it's like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man's leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the gaols emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look.
Hilary Mantel
A filly who wants to run will always find a rider.
Jacques Audiberti
All the great moments of history have taken place inside people’s heads.
Kim Stanley Robinson
We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran. We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent without shape.
Ayn Rand
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
Chance works for us when we are good captains.
George Meredith
There are women whose love only ends with death.
Georges Rodenbach
Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationships between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships.
John Fowles
Your soul is your inner being, your thinking, reasoning, loving, choosing inner being. Your capacity to stand up for what is right. Your capacity to fight against what is wrong. Your capacity to choose even to die for what you believe is right. That's your soul.
Anne Rice
The 'Righteous' are mightier than 'God.
Shivish