Quotes by Novelists - Page 61

The wisest man I have ever known once said to me: 'Nine out of every ten people improve on acquaintance ' and I have found his words true.
Frank Swinnerton
He was an animal, that great thing for someone else to be.
Alan Hollinghurst
Character is just an invention, but it's an invention that serves as both reason and justification for our behaviour. - Broken Verses
Kamila Shamsie
About time, what I really learned from studying English is: time is different with timing.I understand the difference of these two words so well. I understand falling in love with the right person in the wrong timing could be the greatest sadness in a person's entire life.
Xiaolu Guo
The dead never go to their own funeral.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
For some years he had felt weighing on him the burden of loneliness which sometimes overwhelms old bachelors. He had been strong, active and cheerful, spending his days in sport, and his evenings in amusement. Now he was growing dull, and no longer took interest in anything. Exercise tired him, suppers and even dinners made him ill, while women bored him as much as they had once amused him.
Guy de Maupassant
It’s important to know that you're behind, to be able to convince yourself to make sacrifices that get you ahead.
Shivanee Harshey
If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.
Muriel Barbery
I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.
Ayn Rand
Notice how they’ll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once...There’s a special, insidious kind of hatred for him. They forgive criminals. They admire dictators. Crime and violence are a tie. A form of mutual dependence. They need ties. They’ve got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent man kills them—because they don’t exist within him and that’s the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man.
Ayn Rand
The time's gone by for sentiment and all that foolery. Mercy's all very well but after all it's justice that clinches the bargain.
Walter de la Mare
Thank God ever morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done whether you like it or not.
Charles Kingsley
You sit right next to me.Still you don't seem close to me.
Shillpi S Banerrji
Sexuality is general, and although only one man may be receiving the favors of a woman, all men in her presence are warm. That's the great generosity of women and the great generosity of the creator who worked it out that way, that there are no unilateral agreements of sexuality.
Leonard Cohen
The president had shifted to the 'we' mode now, something he invariably did when a potentially unpopular decision was at hand. For the easy ones, it was always 'I.' When he needed a crutch, and especially when he would need someone to blame, he opened up the decisionmaking process and included Critz.
John Grisham
Another of the hard things about being in a war, grandchildren, is that although there are times of quiet when the fighting has stopped, you know you will soon be fighting again. Those quiet times give you the chance to think about what has happened. Some of it you would rather not think about, as you remember the pain and the sorrow. You also have time to worry about what will happen when you go into battle again.
Joseph Bruchac
Now I understand why you grow so many flowers."She shifted her head, not understanding.I said, "To cover the stink of sulphur.
John Fowles
Because the world is in a sick condition and we are all somehow infected, against our will, even if we think we are whole in mind and soul and body.
Robert Graves
Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns, or villages. They have had time to dream in their adolescence. No cars to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty, energy-consuming occupations of the city child. Little that is competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the most impressionable period, long evenings for reading, long afternoons in the fields or woods.
Edna Ferber
Because," she said, "that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn't they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.
Anne Rice
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
W Somerset Maugham
Squashed behind The Cloud of Unknowing we discovered a pocket-size spiral notebook with a day-by-day account of the time Justin had stayed with her and her husband after Tommy’s death. The writing was legible though it required effort (this was before she took her calligraphy course), but Justin was ecstatic and asked if he could have the little notebook. “This is my history,” he said. Later, after he had deciphered every last word: “Boy, was I loved.
Gail Godwin
…having once seen him put forth his strength in battle, methinks I could know him again among a thousand warriors. He rushes into the fray as if he were summoned to a banquet. There is more than mere strength—there seems as if the whole soul and spirit of the champion were given to every blow which he deals upon his enemies. God assoilzie him of the sin of bloodshed! It is fearful, yet magnificent, to behold how the arm and heart of one man can triumph over hundreds.
Walter Scott
But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition— and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation— and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity— the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.
Joseph Conrad
He felt the guilt of inaction, of simply waiting while his life went to waste. No one was worth the gift of his life, no one could possibly be worth that. It belonged to him alone, and he did not deserve it either, because he was letting it waste. It was getting away from him and he made no effort to stop it. He did not know how.
Leonard Gardner
Happy the man and happy he alone He can call today his own. He who secure within can say "Tomorrow do thy worst for I have lived today."
Henry Fielding
Here’s a 165-year old but still fitting comment on public officials who are so sure they’re right that they’ll drive over a cliff rather than compromise: “Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt – are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?” William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: a Novel without a Hero (1848).The author’s middle name really was “Makepeace.” As the quote shows, he disliked those who would not.
William Makepeace Thackeray
All you have to do is choose the right day, the right weather, and you come upon a hidden place in the morning light where time stopped long before you were born
John Burnside
All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived.
Kim Stanley Robinson
One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.
Heather O'Neill
A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.
George R.R. Martin
The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.
John Berger
Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
Thomas Mann
Stay More' is synonymous with 'Status Quo' in fact, there are people who believe, or who like to believe, that the name of the town was intended as an entreaty, beseeching the past to remain present.
Donald Harington
Ser Cleos looked like a weasel, fought like a goose, and had the courage of an especially brave ewe.
George R.R. Martin
Does rough weather choose men over women? Does the sun beat on men, leaving women nice and cool?' Nyawira asked rather sharply. 'Women bear the brunt of poverty. What choices does a woman have in life, especially in times of misery? She can marry or live with a man. She can bear children and bring them up, and be abused by her man. Have you read Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria, Joys of Motherhood? Tsitsi Dangarembga of Zimbabwe, say, Nervous Conditions? Miriama Ba of Senegal, So Long A Letter? Three women from different parts of Africa, giving words to similar thoughts about the condition of women in Africa.''I am not much of a reader of fiction,' Kamiti said. 'Especially novels by African women. In India such books are hard to find.''Surely even in India there are women writers? Indian women writers?' Nyawira pressed. 'Arundhati Roy, for instance, The God of Small Things? Meena Alexander, Fault Lines? Susie Tharu. Read Women Writing in India. Or her other book, We Were Making History, about women in the struggle!''I have sampled the epics of Indian literature,' Kamiti said, trying to redeem himself. 'Mahabharata, Ramayana, and mostly Bhagavad Gita. There are a few others, what they call Purana, Rig-Veda, Upanishads … Not that I read everything, but …''I am sure that those epics and Puranas, even the Gita, were all written by men,' Nyawira said. 'The same men who invented the caste system. When will you learn to listen to the voices of women?
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
I was good and bad, but never wicked.
Anne Rice
The mainland can stretch until it breaks at the weakest points, and those weaknesses are called faults. Each island represented a victory and a defeat: it had either pulled itself free or pulled too hard and found itself alone. Later, as these islands grew older, they turned their misfortune into virtue, learned to accept their cragginess, their misshapen coasts, ragged where they'd been torn. They acquired grace.
Anne Michaels
...Gentlemen don't understand anything, however wise they may be.
Georgette Heyer
I tell you, money can't build your spire for you. Build it of gold and it would simply sink deeper.
William Golding
When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different.
John Fowles
The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.
Anthony Powell
Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.
Sue Grafton
I've known rivers:I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Langston Hughes
i wish you could understand me, but of course it is not the way of this world that we are ever completely understood.
Murasaki Shikibu
The passing time is painful. I have lost the art of moving simply, naturally, within it. I am swept back against its flow. Angry, vindictive, it pierces me all the time, all the time with its spikes.
David Grossman
The worst way to miss someone is to have them sitting right next to you and know you can never have them.
Gabriel García Márquez
Since Aureliano at that time had very confused notions about the difference between Conservatives and Liberals, his father in law gave him some schematic lessons. The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce, to recognize the rights of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate ones, and to cut the country up into a federal system that would take power away from the supereme authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from God, proposed the establishment of public order and family morality. They were the defenders of the faith of Christ, of the principle of authority, and were not prepared to permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities.
Gabriel García Márquez
At times people who are extremely sad become lighthearted for the most trivial reasons, merely to obtain the relief furnished by the exactly opposite condition.
Naguib Mahfouz
Why did you look at the sunset?'Philip answered with his mouth full:Because I was happy.
W Somerset Maugham
Juilin," she asked hesitantly, "what were you going to do with the salt and cooking oil? Not exactly," she added more quickly. "Just a general idea." He looked at her for a moment. "I do not know. But they did not, either. That is the trick of it; their minds made up worse then I ever could. I have seen a tough man break when I sent for a basket of figs and some mice.
Robert Jordan
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
John Fowles
It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly. Each of its phrases found its way through the eyes of the Marquesa, then, carefully wrapped in understanding and forgiveness, it sank into her heart.
Thornton Wilder
The Reverend William Trent, whose mind was of a serious order, had several times warned his elder sister that too lively a sense of humour frequently led to laxity of principle. She now perceived how right he was; and wondered, in dismay, whether it was because he invariably made her laugh that instead of regarding the Nonesuch with revulsion she was obliged to struggle against the impulse to cast every scruple to the winds, and to give her life into his keeping.
Georgette Heyer
In a society where people are obsessed with personal space, dogs have come to serve as welcome, neo-human mediators of loneliness and solitude.
Okey Ndibe
Most humans she knew were badly damaged individuals.
Tim Lebbon
Writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them.
Anne Rice
I handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The type of the Inevitable is death. I remember well that in my youth I believed that I was certainly exempt from its operation. First when my daughter died, next when you were wounded, I knew that I was mortal; and now I regard those years as wasted, as unproductive, in which I was not aware that my death was certain, nay, momently possible. I can now appraise at a glance those who have not yet foreseen their death. I know them for the children they are. They think that by evading its contemplation they are enhancing the savor of life. The reverse is true: only those who have grasped their non-being are capable of praising the sunlight.
Thornton Wilder