Quotes by Novelists - Page 56

Sometimes she could swear that she saw, in Joe Grey's eyes, a judgment far too perceptive, a watchfulness too aware and intense for any cat.Charlie didn't understand what it was about those two [cats]. Both had a presence that set them apart from other felines.Maybe she just knew them better. Maybe all cats had that quality of awareness, when you knew them.
Shirley Rousseau Murphy
I think we are wise, we English speakers, to savor accents. They teach us things about our own tongue.
Anne Rice
They have been taught nothing but destruction and learned nothing except that a man's desires can be achieved simply by killing anybody who stands in his way.
Wilbur Smith
What people are afraid of can tell us a lot about society.
Anne Holt
Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.
George R.R. Martin
Often, people get a temporary high, a fleeting sense of belonging and well-being from the illusion of strength that comes from attaching themselves to gurus, without realizing that the energy they associate with the so called holy person comes from within themselves.
Indu Muralidharan
As they prepared themselves to go ashore no one doubted in theory that at least a certain percentage of them would remain on the island dead, once they set foot on it. But no one expected to be one of these. Still it was an awesome thought and as the first contingents came struggling up on deck in full gear to form up, all eyes instinctively sought out immediately this island where they were to be put, and left, and which might possibly turn out to be a friend's grave.
James Jones
The secret of living is to find a pivot the pivot of a concept on which you can make your stand.
Luigi Pirandello
There are worse prisons than words.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I surrender to it, and by surrendering, I control it.
Robert Jordan
Life always holds in store surprises that are more complex and unforeseeable than any dream, and the secret is to let them come and not block them with castles in the air.
Álvaro Mutis
Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.
Kim Stanley Robinson
To truly hate is an art one learns with time.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.
Guy de Maupassant
They tell each other what they are thinking. But there is no reason to believe anything they say.
Kim Stanley Robinson
One is always a good master when one isn’t the master
Alfred de Vigny
Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it runs by.
Carl Sandburg
Cases of typhoid take the following course:When the fever is at its height, life calls out to the patient: calls out to him as he wanders in his distant dream, and summons him in no uncertain voice. The harsh, imperious call reaches the spirit on that remote path that leads into the shadows, the coolness and peace. He hears the call of life, the clear, fresh, mocking summons to return to that distant scene which he had already left so far behind him, and already forgotten. And there may well up in him something like a feeling of same for a neglected duty; a sense of renewed energy, courage, and hope; he may recognize a bond existing still between him and that stirring, colourful, callous existence which he thought he had left so far behind him. Then, how far he may have wandered on his distant path, he will turn back--and live. But if he shudders when he hears life's voice, if the memory of that vanished scene and the sound of that lusty summons make him shake his head, make him put out his hand to ward off as he flies forward in the way of escape that has opened to him--then it is clear that the patient will die." Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann
If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death.
George Pelecanos
An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children that will never be born (the last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the world already).
Dalton Trumbo
Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.
Hilary Mantel
God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.
William Nicholson
It has always seemed to me that if one falls in love with any gentleman one becomes instantly blind to his faults.But I am not blind to your faults, and I do not think that everything you do or say is right! Only—Is it being—not very comfortable—and cross—and not quite happy, when you aren’t there?” “That, my darling,” said his lordship,taking her ruthlessly into his arms,“is exactly what it s!” “Oh—!” Frederica gasped, as she emerged from an embrace which threatened to suffocate her. “Now I know! I am in love!
Georgette Heyer
She said, "Well, that's right, she's going to heaven very soon. And now it's time for us to say good-bye to her and tell her how much we love her."Mary martha nodded and looked at the needlepoint in her hands."Will her brain still be hurt, in heaven?" she asked.[Rebecca]....said, "Do you remember that time at the beach, when you went into the water with Gran-Gran and the waves were too big and she lifted you up over them? And you two were laughing so much and you said she was the coolest grandmother in the world?"Mary Martha smiled. "Yes""That is how she will be in heaven," Rebecca said.
Tim Farrington
War does not answer war, war does not finish war. The only ending is peace.
Philippa Gregory
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
Hilary Mantel
We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Religious laws, in all the major religious traditions, have both a letter and a spirit. As I understand the words and example of Jesus, the spirit of the law is all-important whereas the letter, while useful… becomes lifeless and deadly without it. In accord with this distinction a yearning to worship on wilderness ridges or beside rivers rather than in churches could legitimately be called evangelical… if your words or deeds harmonize with the example of Jesus, you are evangelical in spirit whether you claim to be or not. When the non-Christian Ambrose Bierce wrote, “War is the means by which Americans learn geography,” his words are aimed at the same antiwar end as “Blessed are the peacemakers.
David James Duncan
Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness.
Richard Russo
The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it's robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It's like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time. No sooner am I out of bed in the morning than work clamps down on me and pins me to my desk before I've even had a breath of fresh air. It follows me to lunch and I find myself chewing over sentences as I'm chewing my food. It goes with me when I go out, eats out of my plate at dinner and shares my pillow in bed at night. It's so extremely merciless that once the process of creation is started, it's impossible for me to stop it, and it goes on growing and working even when I'm asleep. ... Outside that, nothing, nobody exists.
Émile Zola
My Lasher is powerful beyond yourdreams of a daimon, and he has learnt much.’‘Learned,’ I repeated in amazement. ‘How learned, Deborah, for he is merely a spirit, and they areforever foolish and therein lies the danger, that in granting our wishes they do not understand thecomplexity of them, and thereby prove our undoing. There are a thousand tales that prove it. Has this nothappened? How so do you say learned?
Anne Rice
And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience... The extreme violence of the totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.
Vasily Grossman
A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere?
René Daumal
I can't look at everything hard enough!
Thornton Wilder
The Lord doesn't want anybody in His house who has to be dragged there.
Frank D. Gilroy
Dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors,
Gabriel García Márquez
You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.
Imre Kertész
Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.
W Somerset Maugham
Can you drown in grief? She turned away sharply, angry with her own frailty. She had no time for the luxury of self-pity.
George R.R. Martin
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
You've been halfway living your life for too long. May was saying that when it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.
Sue Monk Kidd
Keyholes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together.
Laurence Sterne
In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.
Gabriel García Márquez
If the greatest loss of his life is the loss of a dream he's always known to be a dream, then he's among the fortunate ones.
Kamila Shamsie
Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?
Hilary Mantel
You're not me. You can't feel like I feel.""I can feel.""No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine.""It's not fine. It's just not so bad.
John Fowles
[H]e lay awake, dreading the dawn when he would have to say good-bye to the small universe he had built for himself over the years.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.
Joseph Conrad
The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man’s consciousness in action—the dance presents a stylized version of man’s body in action.
Ayn Rand
Look out how you use proud words.When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back.They wear long boots, hard boots; they walk off proud; they can’t hear you calling -Look out how you use proud words.
Carl Sandburg
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
Lawrence Durrell
It's the fear that kills us, Leah," Jende said. "Sometimes it happens and it's not even as bad as the fear. That is what I have learned in this life. It is the fear.
Imbolo Mbue
The hare-brained chatter of irresponsible frivolity.
Benjamin Disraeli
I did not know then that words and music are more deadly than any spear.
India Edghill
Mr. Lecky could see well enough to eat. He brought his chair over and sat down gratefully while he consumed, but with appetite now, the ham and biscuits which he had disdained in the morning. Even the fact that he was using to cut his ham the knife which had cut a human throat did not disturb him. He had taken care to see that the blade was wiped clean.
James Gould Cozzens
Dont switch the blame to her, that's the oldest trick of all cowards
Ayn Rand
You ask my love completest,As strong next year as now,The devil take you, sweetest,Ere I make aught such vow.Life is a masque that changes,A fig for constancy!No love at all were better,Than love which is not free.
Ernest Dowson
In reality of everyday occurrences I've had to submit to people in order not to lose them. It's less the submission that bothers me, I guess, than how it makes my life miserable. And what happens if I can't forgive myself for making that choice? And what if, in order to keep on living, I have to continue to accept myself? What am I supposed to do? Conclusion: It'd be best if I'm destroyed. The best thing is for me just to vanish.
Natsuo Kirino
I often think that he's the only one of us who's achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean he won't die someday. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with everyday that passes. . . They change, they deny, they contradict- and they call it growth. At the end there is nothing left, nothing unreveresed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out of an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they never held for a single moment? But Howard- one can imagine him living forever.
Ayn Rand
Man’s life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man—for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.
Ayn Rand