Quotes by Novelists - Page 52

From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.
Ayn Rand
I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.
John Fowles
And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh.
Tim O'Brien
I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage – unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has its pimp.
Jean Giraudoux
Idleness and solitude led to these dramatics: an ordinary turd indulging himself as the chief of sinners.
Charles Portis
Beauty is an ecstacy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.
W Somerset Maugham
Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.
Russell Banks
In darkness, some flowers blossom!
Shirley Houston
The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
John Berger
He’d promised her forever, but now that there was another option, would he want to take it? He’d said not, but Bessina had butterflies taking up residence in her stomach at the thought. She had to know for sure.
Inger Iversen
-Money? in a voice that rustled.
William Gaddis
As your father keeps clean his lamp to have good light, so keep clean your spirit.
Richard Llewellyn
Nevertheless, in this sea of human wretchedness and malice there bloomed at times compassion, as a pale flower blooms in a putrid marsh.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
May knowledge come to us! What is this secret our heart has understood and yet will not reveal to us, although it seems to beat as if it were endeavoring to tell it?
Ayn Rand
Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.
W Somerset Maugham
Help us to be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light nothing flowers.
May Sarton
And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.
John Irving
Success is not worth rejoicing over, failure is not worth grieving over.
Luo Guanzhong
And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is food somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.
May Sarton
Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.
Joseph Conrad
Only the brave know how to forgive. ... A coward never forgave it is not in his nature.
Laurence Sterne
What's the reason behind success and failure. The answer is simple ME
shivangi lavaniya
Silver’s sweet and gold’s our mother, but once you’re dead they’re worth less than that last shit you take as you lie dying.
George R.R. Martin
Robb says the man died bravely, but Jon says he was afraid.""What do you think?" his father asked.Bran thought about it. "can a man still be brave if he's afraid?""That is the only time a man can be brave," his father told him.
George R.R. Martin
Abroad? Oh no. I went to England in ’91, and you stood in the garden at Fontenay and berated me.” He shook his head. “This is my nation. Here I stay. A man can’t carry his country on the soles of his shoes.
Hilary Mantel
It's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on.Pg.406
Hilary Mantel
Little things affect little minds.
Benjamin Disraeli
Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!
Charles Portis
I like it too," Angelo said. "I love this country. Much you and anybody, and you know it.""I know it," Prew said."But I still hate this country. You love the Army. But I dont love the Army. This country's Army is why I hate this country. What did this country ever do for me? Gimme a right to vote for men I cant elect? You can have it. Gimme a right to work at a job I hate? You can have that too. Then tell I'm a Citizen of the greatest richest country on earth, if I dont believe it look at Park Avenue. Carnival prizes. All carnival prizes. [..] They shouldnt teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a li
James Jones
For man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers ; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them. On the other hand, when he is happy, he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't analyse it, just as if happiness were his right.
Luigi Pirandello
Great wits jump
Laurence Sterne
Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images, the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire: that is MUHAMMAD. As regards all the standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask IS THERE ANY MAN GREATER THAN HE?
Alphonse de Lamartine
Never before had I felt trapped, so seduced and caught up in a story,' Clara explained, 'the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone, changed my life.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Daisuke was the sort of man who, once he was disturbed by something, no matter what, could not let go of it until he had pursued it to the utmost. Moreover, having the capacity to assess the folly of any given obsession, he was forced to be doubly conscious of it. Three of four years ago he had tackled the question of the process whereby his waking mind entered the realm of dreams. At night, when he had gotten under the covers and begun to doze off nicely, he would immediately think, this is it, this is how I fall asleep. No sooner had he thought of this than he was wide awake. When he had managed to doze off again, he would immediately think, here it is. Night after night, he was plagued by his curiosity and would repeat the same procedure two or three times. In the end, he became disgusted in spite of himself. He wanted somehow to escape his agony. Moreover, he was thoroughly impressed by the extent of his folly. To appeal to his conscious mind in order to apprehend his unconscious, and to try to recollect both at the same time was, as James had put it, analogous to lighting a candle to examine the dark, or stopping a top in order to study is movements; at that rate, it stood to reason that he would never again be able to sleep. He knew all this, but when night came, he still thought, now...
Sōseki Natsume
Am I doomed? Flashing darkness is pretty much the same as flashing light really. Fear isn’t at all the same as courage but after a certain point perhaps being afraid of everything is the same as being afraid of nothing.
Russell Hoban
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
George Moore
Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham.
Anthony Powell
Living as I do with human beings, the more that I observe them, the more I am forced to conclude that they are selfish.
Sōseki Natsume
In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain.
Gabriel García Márquez
...chance is sometimes a wonderful accomplice in crime.
Émile Gaboriau
You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
Joseph Conrad
I remembered the old doctor, - "It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot." I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.
Joseph Conrad
When you're sorting yourself out, family are not often the ones you can turn to. They represent the place of departure and not the place of arrival.
Witi Ihimaera
He is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment... when he is consumed in the service of an idea in the conquest of the goal pursued.
R. Briffault
He was no lover in a worldly sense; the only love he knew was that of divine understanding, of taking a whole life into its depths as if they were his own. From this, the greatest pain, the greatest happiness is born: the hope that we too will one day be understood, strangers will accept our words, our lives, as if they were their own.
Dezső Kosztolányi
It struck me, sharp and hard, that I had been given so many chances to save my soul that my entire life had been constructed around these chances! That was my nature - going from temptation to temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.
Anne Rice
Her past is behind her, her future is of little concern. She moves towards the grave, at her own speed.
Anne Enright
Vengeance is a delicious fruit, which must be allowed to ripen in order that it may be fully enjoyed.
Émile Gaboriau
The essence of true friendship is to make allowance for another's little lapses.
David Storey
I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.
John Fowles
The festivity had reached that apogee of joy when you face the happy fate of being crushed to death.
Émile Zola
If a man felt hostility and aversion, but saw that he had poor or no grounds for his feeling, the remedy was to look for good or at least better grounds--a search hid predisposing thoughts would help him in.
James Gould Cozzens
I really believe," said Wanda thoughtfully,"that your madness is nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. Our unnatural way of life must generate such illnesses. Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
In the course of crime ... the descent is rapid.
Frederick Marryat
Beloved, we join hands here to pray for gin. An aridity defiles us. Our innards thirst for the juice of juniper. Something must be done. The drought threatens to destroy us. Surely, God who let manna fall from the heavens so that the holy children of Israel might eat, will not let the equally holy children of Niggeratti Manor die from the want of a little gin. Children, let us pray.
Wallace Thurman
I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
At the heart of most things that look bad is something that can be good and useful.
William Kent Krueger
The thing about tears is that they can be as quiet as a cloud floating across the desert sky.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.
Ayn Rand
Nobody scarce doth any good, yet they all agree in praising those who do. Indeed, it is strange that all men should consent in commending goodness, and no man endeavour to deserve that commendation; whilst, on the contrary, all rail at wickedness, and all are as eager to be what they abuse.
Henry Fielding