Quotes by Novelists - Page 62

Stories can save us.
Tim O'Brien
Wolves and women wed for life.
George R.R. Martin
How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses - with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or too distant, such as the beings who live on a star or the creatures which live in a drop of water... with ears that deceive us by converting vibrations of the air into tones that we can hear, for they are sprites which miraculously change movement into sound, a metamorphosis which gives birth to harmonies which turn the silent agitation of nature into song... with our sense of smell, which is poorer than any dog's... with our sense of taste, which is barely capable of detecting the age of a wine!Ah! If we had other senses which would work other miracles for us, how many more things would we not discover around us!
Guy de Maupassant
I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.
Jean Rhys
...she was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quiet easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people's shit in buckets on his head.
Chinua Achebe
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
John Irving
[The wilderness] had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.
Joseph Conrad
Your beauty is tragic.It is the sweetest sin,Heaven ever created!
Shillpi S Banerrji
The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.
John Fowles
God bears with the wicked but not forever.
Cervantes
Jedi do not fight for peace. That's only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are. Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace. We fight for justice because justice is the fundamental bedrock of civilization: an unjust civilization is built upon sand. It does not long survive a storm.
Matthew Woodring Stover
Reading is probably another way of being in a place.
José Saramago
You don't understand the things I do, but I do have my reasons. They're not your reasons, so they're not real to you, but they're real to me, and that's enough.
Tom Topor
What did you spend so much time talking about with Ila? If you weren’t dancing with that long-legged fellow, you were talking to her like it was some kind of secret.”“Ila was giving me advice on being a woman,” Egwene replied absently. He began laughing, and she gave him a hooded, dangerous look that he failed to see.“Advice! Nobody tells us how to be men. We just are.”“That,” Egwene said, “is probably why you make such a bad job of it.
Robert Jordan
Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
Gabriel García Márquez
Many a month of gloomy unconsciousness rolled over me, without date or notice. One thousand waves may welter over a sunk wreck, and be felt as one.
Charles Robert Maturin
Dagny leaned back in her chair. The short sentence was a shock. It was not merely relief: it was the sudden realization that nothing else was necessary to guarantee that it would be done; she needed no proofs, no questions, no explanations; a complex problem could rest safely on three syllables pronounced by a man who knew what he was saying.
Ayn Rand
She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you.
Jean Rhys
The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins. It always wins because it is everywhere. It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet. The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.
Matthew Woodring Stover
We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!
Paul Laurence Dunbar
If we are taken all together, we might muster some courage, but from the previous evidence it is likely that we will be taken separately.
Edna O'Brien
They were like two inviolable spheres touching at a fine point in their curves, touching but failing to penetrate, failing to breathe the other's air.
Joshua Ferris
It is not by great acts but by small failures that freedom dies. The sense of justice dies slowly in a people. They grow used to the unthinkable,and sometimes they may look back and even wonder when things changed. Theywill not find a day or a time or a place. Justice and liberty die quietly, because men first learnto ignore injustice and then no longer recognize it.
Charles Morgan
nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
Gabriel García Márquez
A small spoon of victory is just the thing to settle the stomach before battle, " Ser Imry had declared happily.
George R.R. Martin
If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.
Muriel Spark
the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.
Jasper Fforde
The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like the sunset...Nothing would be left, the golden ferns and the silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses...When they had finished, there would be nothing left but blackened walls and the mounting stone. That was always left. That could not be stolen or burned.
Jean Rhys
When the man was disgraced and told to go away, he was allowed to ask all the animals whether any of them would come with him and share his fortunes and his life. There were only two who agreed to come entirely of their own accord, and they were the dog and the cat. And ever since then, those two have been jealous of each other, and each is for ever trying to make man choose which one he likes best. Every man prefers one or the other.
Richard Adams
Tears upon the dry sponge of heartdo not prove I am Promethean.
Adrian C. Louis
You have a genius for bringing trouble upon yourself
Georgette Heyer
We've established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived... and people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal nothing!
Paddy Chayefsky
Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength his glory and his pleasure.
George Sand
He has not a single redeeming defect.
Benjamin Disraeli
All reformers are bachelors.
George Moore
Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.
Gabriel García Márquez
My thoughts by night are often filled With visions false as fair: For in the past alone I build My castles in the air.
Thomas Love Peacock
She was lost in her longing to understand.
Gabriel García Márquez
You're being parental', I said. 'Go find that squid'.
Daryl Gregory
When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.
Edna O'Brien
Change is inevitable in a progressive society. Change is constant.
Benjamin Disraeli
A stranger's eyes see clearest.
Charles Reade
He became...the ideal of that virtue which delights in its own work...doing everything with simplicity and dignity, for he seemed to realize that his objective added nobility to everything he did.
Honoré de Balzac
Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity never of the correctness of a belief.
Arthur Schnitzler
She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.
Émile Zola
The wolf blood, Arya remembered now. I'll be as strong as Robb, I said I would. She took a deep breath, then lifted the broomstick in both hands and brought down across her knee. It broke with a loud crack, and she threw the pieces aside. 'I am a direwolf, and done with the wooden teeth.
George R.R. Martin
The Consul looked at the sun. But he had lost the sun: it was not his sun. Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face; he did not want to go anywhere near it, least of all, sit in its light, facing it.
Malcolm Lowry
I'm beginning to think you're the sort of person who does a great deal with very little."He meant a liar.
Jasper Fforde
Our enemies leave our bodies for the crows and the wolves. Our friends bury us in secret graves.
George R.R. Martin
...the words make our silences easier--they're the current that runs under them.
Sue Miller
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.
Edna Ferber
I don't care... Actually i do... That's the whole problem...
shivangi lavaniya
Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the foot of the feudal system!
William Dean Howells
Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for you him and take him as his ward.
Philippa Gregory
In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A childish feeling, I admit, but, when we retire from the conventions of society and draw close to nature, we involuntarily become children: each attribute acquired by experience falls away from the soul, which becomes anew such as it was once and will surely be again.
Mikhail Lermontov
But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.'But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other ...The king says, 'You turn your boy out beautifully. No nobleman could do more.''I don't want him to be Achilles,' he says, 'I only want him not to be flattened.
Hilary Mantel
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
Shirley Jackson
Some boys... Are perfect shits. & other boys are very, very beautiful.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz