Quotes by Novelists - Page 55

But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished— behold!— all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile— and the return to an eternal rest.
Joseph Conrad
Most of my kin are bastards," [Tyrion] said with a wry smile, "but you're the first I've had to friend.
George R.R. Martin
Larry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world's confusion, so wistful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful and so cagey, so mean and so generous, which is the people of the United States.
W Somerset Maugham
Yes, I am crying although I am a man. But has not a man eyes! Has not a man hands, limbs,senses, thoughts, passions? Is he not fed with the wine food, hurt by the same weapons, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a woman? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? And if you poison us, do we not die? Why shouldn't a man complain, a soldier weep? Because it is unmanly? Why is it unmanly?
August Strindberg
I feel a very unusual sensation - if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.
Benjamin Disraeli
There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.
Wallace Stegner
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight.
Sue Miller
I have nothing to do with others, I am only concerned with myself. I take advantage of the fact that the majority of mankind are led by certain rewards to do things which directly or indirectly tend to my convenience.’‘It seems to me an awfully selfish way of looking at things,’ said Philip.‘But are you under the impression that men ever do anything except for selfish reasons?’‘Yes.’‘It is impossible that they should. You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognise the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life—their pleasure.
W Somerset Maugham
Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.
May Sarton
How are things on the edge of space?
Tim Lebbon
One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them.
Richard Russo
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
Cesare Pavese
Boy, you're good at figuring things out. Isn't he? Except that if anybody's the devil in this room it's _you_, buster." An extraordinary bitterness came into his face. "I've seen you before. I know you, all right, preacher man. Age after age, you come back. You always lead the crusades. You're so damned golden-tongued, other people just flock to die for your causes. You die with them, it's true, because you're stupid enough to believe your own great lies; but you always come back again somehow. Oh, I know _you_.
Kage Baker
Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corrpution and error hardwired at inception.
Jasper Fforde
Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
Honoré de Balzac
No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
Gabriel García Márquez
The biggest magic of the world is DEATH.
Shilpa Dasgupta
The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.
John Fowles
Mysteries precede humankind, envelop us and draw us forward into exploration and wonder. Secrets are the work of humankind, a covert and often insidious way to gather, withhold or impose power. Do not confuse the pursuit of one with the manipulation of the other.
Mark Frost
They were talking more distantly than if they were strangers who had just met, for if they had been he would have been interested in her just because of that, and curious, but their common past was a wall of indifference between them. Kitty knew too well that she had done nothing to beget her father's affection, he had never counted in the house and had been taken for granted, the bread-winner who was a little despised because he could provide no more luxuriously for his family; but she had taken for granted that he loved her just because he was her father, and it was a shock to discover that his heart was empty of feeling for her. She had known that they were all bored by him, but it had never occurred to her that he was equally bored by them. He was as ever kind and subdued, but the sad perspicacity which she had learnt in suffering suggested to her that, though he probably never acknowledged it to himself and never would, in his heart he disliked her.
W Somerset Maugham
The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.
Thomas Mann
This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit...
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading--and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading...
Muriel Barbery
Well, sometimes love seems easy. Like ... it's easy to love rain ... and hawks. And it's easy to love wild plums ... and the moon. But with people, seems like love's a hard thing to know. It gets all mixed up. I mean, you can love one person in one way and another person in another way. But how do you know you love the right one in every way?""I'm not sure, but I think you'll know. I think if it's the right person, it'll be better than rain and hawks and wild plums. Even better than the moon. I think it'll be better than all that put together.
Billie Letts
Dalam mengarang saya tidak pernah tergesa-gesa. Saya anggap pekerjaan mengarang adalah tugas yang santai, yang harus dikerjakan dengan senang hati. Kalau saya menulisnya dengan terburu-buru, berarti dengan hati yang kesal, maka dapat dipastikan bahwa si pembaca pun akan merasakannya.
Nh. Dini
Come clean with a child heartLaugh as peaches in the summer windLet rain on a house roof be a songLet the writing on your facebe a smell of apple orchards on late June.
Carl Sandburg
Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas
Langston Hughes
Without balance, a life is no longer worth the effort.
Olen Steinhauer
At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.
Gabriel García Márquez
Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
Joseph Conrad
Cheerfulness means a contented spirit, a pure heart, a kind and loving disposition; it means humility and ~ charity, a generous appreciation of others, and a modest opinion of self.
William Makepeace Thackeray
He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.
Gustave Flaubert
Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you're born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.
José Saramago
So what is it you're going to show me today?""A number of things. In fact, what I'm going to show you is part of a story. Didn't you tell me the other day that what you like to do is read?"Bea nodded, arching her eyebrows."Well, this is a story about books.""About books?""About accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.""You sound like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel.""That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story. As real as the fact that this bread they served us is at least three days old. And, like all true stories, it begins and ends in a cemetery, although not the sort of cemetery you imagine."She smiled the way children smile when they've been promised a riddle or a magic trick."I'm all ears.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Ours must be the first age whose great goal on a nonmaterial plane is not fulfillment but adjustment.
Louis Kronenberger
It's okay to feel like shit. It's okay to feel worthless. It's okay to feel insignificant. It's okay to miss someone you can't have. It's okay to have a tightness in your chest or a burning sensation on your arms or legs and it's okay to not want to eat or sleep or just overall hurt yourself or worse. It's okay to feel like your world is crashing down and it's okay to feel like you can't do this. But the point is that you try. And no matter who you are, or what age you are. Whether you're my ex from third grade (if I had one) or a random three year old who's just had a bad day. If you're 56 and your wife just divorced you and you just wanna think or get advice or anything. I'll be here. It's okay to think you're a whore, but you aren't. It's okay to feel really dumb. But I'll do my best to convince you otherwise. Cuz I can't do much, I can't. I can't completely understand what you're feeling. And I'm sorry about that. But I can sure as hell try. And I'll try my very best.
Shiv Malhotra
Sometimes, the best thing you can do is nothing. Catelyn
George R.R. Martin
Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions.
Alexander Pushkin
we do not write as we want but as we can
W Somerset Maugham
Strength to your arm, then.
George R.R. Martin
I was a sinner. I knew that without a doubt. But I was not alone. And the night was the accomplice of us all.
William Kent Krueger
J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible."[Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 4 March 1831]
George Sand
old stories are like old friends (...) you have to visit them from time to time.
George R.R. Martin
Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again. 'May I presume to suggest,' yelled Shandy giddily to Davies, 'that we preoceed the hell out of here with all due haste.' Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. 'My dear fellow consider it done.
Tim Powers
Strange how this war was making them all Americans.
Newt Gingrich and William R Forstchen
She never opened her mail in the middle of the day. Sometimes she forgot about it for a week or more until people rang to complain. Nor did she check her answering machine messages. In fact, it had only been in the last year that she had finally bought an answering machine, and she steadfastly refused to have a mobile, to the incredulity of all those around her, who didn’t believe that people could actually function without one. But Frieda wanted to be able to escape from incessant communications and demands. She didn’t want to be at anyone’s beck and call, and she liked cutting herself off from the urgent inanities of the world. When she was on her own, she liked to be truly alone. Out of contact and adrift.
Nicci French
I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
...grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.
George R.R. Martin
Believe everything you hear said of the world nothing is too impossibly bad.
Honoré de Balzac
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
George Santayana
one bothers oneself for nothing.
Mbella Sonne Dipoko
fLIFE says Loneliness Is Friendly Enemy -shivangi lavaniya
shivangi lavaniya
The river of life, of mysterious laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted embankment; and along that other deserted embankment Charles now begins to pace, a man behind the invisible gun carriage on which rests his own corpse. He walks towards an imminent, self-given death? I think not; for he has at which to build; has already begun, though he would still bitterly deny it, thought there are tears in his eyes to support his denial, to realize that life, however advantageously Sarah may in some ways seem to fit the role of Sphinx, is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.
John Fowles
Red's world, you see, is a closed circle. Not that it matters. I know that I'm a closed circle, too, and it's all I can do to find some starting point from myself, while at the same time trying to find my own terminus. There's no way I'm ever going to find my beginning or end in somebody else's circle. Two people together never add up to anything more than one person added to another. That we continue to add ourselves up in this way is the reason human beings will always be lonely.
Xiaolu Guo
Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.
Ayn Rand
I felt at one and the same time quite close, within reach of my hand, and yet an infinite distance away, an unknown world of goodness. Often Isa had said to me: 'You, who see nothing but evil.... You, who see evil everywhere....' It was true, and it was not true.
François Mauriac
There is no greater thing in life than that secret sense of harmony that unites us briefly with the great mysteries of others and allows us to travel alongside them for part of the way.
Álvaro Mutis
‎"The days are hot and the dead lie unburied. We cannot fetch them all in, if we did we should not know what to do with them. The shells will bury them...
Enrich M. Remarque
The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.
José Saramago