Quotes by Novelists - Page 6

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
Thomas Mann
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
If you don't know everything, you must go on with what you do know.
Robert Jordan
Paris shook his head."Do you think I would teach just anyone to fight me to the death? I want you to be my wife. My one and only wife.
Anne Fortier
In his refusal to believe in anything supernatural or inherently evil, he was as unrealistic as an old voodoo queen who sees spirits everywhere.
Anne Rice
Those that see too much quickly find themselves seeing nothing at all.
Jasper Fforde
Then a calm fell upon him. The gushing began from all sorts of places, all over his body. He heard pleasurable little giggles on the outer edges of his mind, in the dark creases behind his thoughts. He felt good, better than he’d felt in years. As if he were inside a huge embrace. And he felt as if he had finally reached the right place, his home, his motherland.
David Grossman
Travel is ninety per cent anticipation and ten per cent recollection.
Edward Streeter
En su habitación del hotel la muerte, desnuda, está delante del espejo. No sabe quién es.
José Saramago
I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind-and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.
Ayn Rand
If you are destined to become a writer, you can't help it. If you can help it, you aren't destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn't have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing.
Donald Harington
By the hairy balls of Jesus
Hilary Mantel
If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art.
Gustave Flaubert
Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.
Ayn Rand
Why mayn't they do what men do?' the Hero cried impetuously. 'I hate that contemptible narrow-mindedness. It's that that makes the ruin and horrors I see. Why mayn't they do what men do? I like the women who are brave enough not to be hypocrites. By Heaven! if these women are bad, I like them better than a set of hypocritical creatures who are all show, and deceive you in the end.
George Meredith
Anything you like; anything I like... No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us
Jean Rhys
Awake and asleep the novel is with you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of the story as though they had hung suspended in air for years, waiting.
Edna Ferber
Ah what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this our life!
George Meredith
So long, Lee. Give our regards to the Kaiser. And tell him there's a few boys on 58th Street who'll throw a party for him if he'll drop around.
James T. Farrell
This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. When Christianity clothed it in the teachings of the Church Fathers, it began to fade; its kernel became a husk. It remains potent only while it is dumb and senseless, hidden in the living darkness of the human heart – before it becomes a tool or commodity in the hands of preachers, before its crude ore is forged into the gilt coins of holiness. It is as simple as life itself. Even the teachings of Jesus deprived it of its strength.But, as I lost faith in good, I began to lose faith even in kindness. It seemed as beautiful and powerless as dew. What use was it if it was not contagious?How can one make a power of it without losing it, without turning it into a husk as the Church did? Kindness is powerful only while it is powerless. If Man tries to give it power, it dims, fades away, loses itself, vanishes.
Vasily Grossman
We are faithful as long as we love, but youdemand faithfulness of a woman without love, and the giving ofherself without enjoyment. Who is cruel there--woman or man?
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Nothing returns, nothing begins anew; it is never the same thing, and yet it seems always the same. For, if the days never return, every moment brings forth new beings whose destiny it will be to create for themselves, in the course of their lives, the same illusions that have companioned and at times illuminated ours. The fabric is eternal; eternal, the embroidery. A universe dies when we die; another is born when a new creature comes to earth with a new sensibility. If, then, it is very true that nothing begins all over again, it is very just to say, too, that everything continues. One may fearlessly advance the latter statement or the former, according to whether one considers the individual or the blending of generations. From this second point of view, everything is coexistent; the same cause produces contradictory, yet logical effects. All the colors and their shades are printed at a single impression, to form the wonderful image we call life.
Rémy de Gourmont
Hazel, like nearly all wild animals, was unaccustomed to look up at the sky. What he thought of as the sky was the horizon, usually broken by trees and hedges.
Richard Adams
As he walked, the sad faded leaves were driven pitilessly around him by the wind, and under the mingling influences of autumn and evening, a craving for the quietude of the grave … overtook him with unwanted intensity.
Georges Rodenbach
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.
Robert Jordan
There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage; who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistable charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed with a ‘Good-night, father!’ Hourly they meet the gaze of eyes they would fain close forever, eyes that still open each morning to the light. . . God alone knows the number of those who are parricides in thought
Honoré de Balzac
We live in our desires rather than in our achievements
George Moore
I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs.
Ayn Rand
Alan Campbell opened one eye.From somewhere in remote distances, muffled beyond sight or sound, his soul crawled back painfully, through subterranean corridors, up into his body again. Toward the last it moved to a cacophony of hammers and lights. Then he was awake.The first eye was bad enough. But, when he opened his second eye, such as rush of anguish flowed through his brain that he hastily closed them again.
John Dickson Carr
and when his lips touched mine forthe very first time . . . i knew he is theone
shivangi lavaniya
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
You don't get it boy... this isn't a mudhole... its an operating table. (KRAKKKKK) And I'm the surgeon.
Frank Miller
Assim é, mas a vantagem da igreja é que, embora às vezes o não pareça, ao gerir o que está no alto, governa o que está em baixo.
José Saramago
Ever since the morning, Pierre had beheld many frightful sufferings in that woeful white train. But none had so distressed his soul as did that wretched female skeleton, liquefying in the midst of its lace and its millions.
Émile Zola
It is strange how you shall hate a man, and yet pity him from the depths.
Richard Llewellyn
Words are not swords.
George R.R. Martin
In June we picked the clover,And sea-shells in July:There was no silence at the door,No word from the sky.A hand came out of AugustAnd flicked his life away:We had not time to bargain, mope,Moralize, or pray.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
Wallace Stegner
Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.
Ayn Rand
How was I to be a scientist, father Lion?' Science is knowing. What could I have known? Others always did the knowing, knew what was in me, what should come out of me, what was best for me. I didn't know who I was, what I wanted. I know less now, and I am afraid.
Russell Hoban
He, the true writer, is the department store dummy at the very center of the whole establishment, the one left alone on display all night, a price tag stapled to every piece of clothing they’ve yanked onto him, binoculars and frog flippers included. He is the neutral, generic human form, the gray center who must always assume disguises — in order to be seen and, therefore, to feel himself.
Allan Gurganus
If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
W Somerset Maugham
... life wasn't full of problems, it was rich with decisions.
Shirley Rousseau Murphy
If and when our civilization comes to ruin, the destructive agent will be Science; man's knowledge of science, applied to warfare, meaning slaughter not only of human bodies, but of human institutions, of all we have created through the centuries.
Cicely Hamilton
What is it that love does to a woman? Without it she only sleeps with it alone she lives.
Ouida
When you aren't sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; that's the basic principle of every faith.
Alberto Moravia
The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver--over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher thanthe wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a somber gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur.All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing thatcouldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there?
Joseph Conrad
And did with sighs their fate deplore,Since I must shelter them no more;And if before my joys were such,In having heard, and seen too much,My grief must be as great and high,When all abandoned I shall be,Doomed to a silent destiny.
Aphra Behn
I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
Muriel Barbery
Back therefore we find ourselves returning. Back to the wisdom of the plough; back to the wisdom of those who follow the sea. It is all a matter of the wheel coming full-circle. For the sophisticated system of mental reactions to which we finally give our adherence is only the intellectualised reproduction of what more happily constituted natures, without knowing what they possess, possess. Thus between true philosophers and the true simple people there is a magnetic understanding; whereas, the clever ones whose bastard culture only divorces them from the wisdom of the earth remain pilloried and paralysed on the prongs of their own conceit".
John Cowper Powys
But Moby-Dick is the explanation of America. It’s not just a novel. It is a book of prophecy. It is the book. It is the book of America.
Robert Stone
Sandar came to stand beside him, frowning down at the crumpled High Lord. "He does not look so mighty lying there," he said wonderingly. "He does not look so much greater than me.
Robert Jordan
He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.
Hilary Mantel
Let everything be remade on simple lines. There is only one people, there is only one people!
Henri Barbusse
First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.
Anne Rice
You know, kid, ethics isn't about choosing between right and wrong; it's about choosing between grey and grey. It's about choosing between two equally desirable but mutually exclusive courses of action. Freedom or security? Courage or comfort? Self-examination or blissful happiness? Column A or Column B?
Will Ferguson
I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people.
Jean Giono
A large American automobile came crawling close to us, and we could hear from behind its thick windows the deep bass of the radio, and the nasty words of a hateful song.It seemed like so much of modern music, a din to drive human beings mad.
Anne Rice
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
Gustave Flaubert
Words could be like food - they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz