Quotes by Novelists - Page 64

I believe in the devil, in the Powers of Darkness, Lawford, as firmly as I believe he and they are powerless – in the long run. They – what shall we say? - have surrendered their intrinsicality. You can just go through evil, as you can go through a sewer, and come out on the other side. A loathsome process too.
Walter de la Mare
Weather is a purely personal matter. There is no such thing as a climate that is cold or hot, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. People take it upon themselves to create a fantasy in their imagination and call it weather. There's only one climate in the world, but the message that nature sends is interpreted according to strictly personal, non-transferable rules.
Álvaro Mutis
It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
Wallace Stegner
Everybody has a right to their own troubles.
Thornton Wilder
In summer the empire of insects spreads.
Adam Zagajewski
They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.
Émile Zola
If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astonishing results are the three criteria of a human genius, who could dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad?
Alphonse de Lamartine
It is those who injure women who get the most kindness from them.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Tell me,' the man leans forward ans says, 'have you heard of a lady called Madeleine? No? In 1996, this lady named Albright Madeleine, the US ambassador to the United Nations, was asked on television how she felt about the fact that five hundred thousand Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions? Do you know what she said? She said that it was "a very hard choice" but "we think the price is worth it". These are her exact words. How do you feel about that?'How do you think I feel about that? And I would take your love for children more seriously if you didn't have children cleaning your floors.
Nadeem Aslam
How could anyone love Him? What did you just tell me yourself about the world? Don't you see, everybody hates God now. It's not that God is dead in the twentieth century. It's that everybody hates Him! At least I think so.
Anne Rice
2There 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
A hedge knight must hold tight to his pride. Without it, he was no more than a sellsword
George R.R. Martin
But the world doesn't run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. - Alan Furst; Red Gold
Alan Furst
Hope is the greatest madness. What can we expect of a world that we enter with the assurance of seeing our fathers and mothers die? A world where, if two beings love each other and give their lives to each other, both can be sure that one will watch the other perish?
Alfred de Vigny
We are governed not by armies and police but by ideas.
Mona Caird
The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
Wilkie Collins
Queer creatures, females," mused Mr. Standen, shaking his head. "Fellow's only got to be a rake to have 'em all dangling after him. Silly, really, because it stands to reason---- Well never mind that!
Georgette Heyer
And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.
Sue Monk Kidd
It is as though we are understanding now what (William) Blake intuited, the senses were, in Eden, spread over the whole being. It might seem, then, that our bodies still live in Eden, but our minds refuse to know it.
Peter Redgrove
When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
W Somerset Maugham
Such was the code that the world had accepted and such was the key to the code: that it hooked man’s love of existence to a circuit of torture, so that only the man who had nothing to offer would have nothing to fear, so that the virtues which made life possible and the values which gave it meaning became the agents of its destruction, so that one’s best became the tool of one’s agony, and man’s life on earth became impractical.
Ayn Rand
There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil - anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power.
Vasily Grossman
What's an artist but the dregs of his work - the human shambles that follows it around?
William Gaddis
There were times when it seemed the different parts of him where not all under the same management.
Russell Hoban
They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.
Kim Stanley Robinson
The books—the generous friends who met me without suspicion—the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.
Wilkie Collins
There ought to be at least as much common sense about living and dying as there is about going to the grocery store and buying a loaf of bread.
Dalton Trumbo
That's a rather subversive idea, isn't it? "Do you think so? I don't. If it is subversive, then everything else is too, even breathing. I feel and think as naturally and necessarily as I breathe. If men hate each other, then there is not hope. We will all be the victims of that hate. We will slaughter each other in wars we don't want and for which we're not responsible. They'll put a flag in front of us and fill ours ears with words. And why? To plant the seeds for a new war, to create more hatred, to create new flags and new words. Is that why we're here? To have children and hurl them into the fiery furnace? To build cities and then raze them to the ground? To long for peace and have war instead? "And would love solve everything," asked Able with a sad, slightly ironic smile. "I don't know. It's the only thing we haven't tried so far..." "And will we be in time?" "Possibly. If those who suffer can be convinced that it's true, then yes, we might be in time..." He paused, as if assailed by a sudden thought, "But don't forget, Abel, you must love with a love that is lucid and active! And make sure that the active side never forgets abut the lucid side and that the active side never commits the same kind of villainous deeds as those who want men to hate each other. Active, but lucid. And above all, lucid!
José Saramago
Was’ and ‘is’ – in English there is very little difference between these two words. Only one letter more , just two letters different. But it is a lifetime, it is a world of difference. Time does not allow you to take the past along with you. Nothing remains unchanged. Love gets diluted, hate is forgotten and friendship and enmity keep shifting all the time. One day, when you look back, you will ask yourself – what was it all about.
Shashi Deshpande
Merdeka!' the Malay man screamed.'Merdekaaaaaa!' the sea of people echoed.
Mohamed Latiff Mohamed
Their eyes were dark and hard and glowing, with no fear in them, no kindness and no guilt.
Ayn Rand
God forgives those who invent what they need.
Ayn Rand
Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery because we have ... the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality ... which from time to time reveals itself to be vain and illusory.
Luigi Pirandello
I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional ... My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.
Georges Simenon
The deadliest feeling that can be offered to a woman is pity.
Vicki Baum
In the kitchen, her family nibbled Helen’s lemon squares. Melanie urged brownies on the nurses. “Take these,” she told Lorraine. “We can’t eat them all, but Helen won’t stop baking.”“Sweetheart,” Lorraine said, “everybody mourns in her own way.”Helen mourned her sister deeply. She arrived each day with shopping bags. Her cake was tender with sliced apples, but her almond cookies crumbled at the touch. Her pecan bars were awful, sticky-sweet and hard enough to break your teeth. They remained untouched in the dining room, because Helen never threw good food away.
Allegra Goodman
how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence--utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness
Joseph Conrad
One must not make too much of anything in life, good or bad.
Joseph Conrad
And of a Sunday swarm the folkUnder the honeysuckle vine, Quaffing, the while they talk and smoke, The sun, the melody, the wine.
Théophile Gautier
Friendship is the perfection of love and superior to love it is love purified exalted proved by experience and a consent of minds. Love Madam may and love does often stop short of friendship.
Samuel Richardson
Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.
Jasper Fforde
An exceedingly well-informed report,' said the General. 'You have given yourself the trouble to go into matters thoroughly, I see. That is one of the secrets of success in life.
Anthony Powell
But vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
Gustave Flaubert
Every misogynist came out of a woman.
Mat Johnson
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
George Santayana
Look!You want to see? See! Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my cursed ugliness! Look at Erik's face! Now you know the face of the voice! You were not content to hear me, eh? You wanted to know what I looked like? Oh, you women are so inquisitive! Well, are you satisfied? I'm a good-looking fellow, eh?...When a woman has seen me, as you have, she belongs to me.She loves me forever! I am a kind of Don Juan, you know!...Look at me! I am Don Juan Triumphant! -Erik in The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux
WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, Papa used to tell me that words fly on wild winds from the mouths of sly people. When the winds pick up, he said, sand blows into your ears and bites your eyes. Storms build overhead like a lake with a spout, but you can’t see or hear. Only when you are safely sheltered, Papa said, can you tell which way the wind is blowing. Only from the calm, he said, can you see how to protect yourself from trouble.
Lawrence Hill
blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born.
José Saramago
A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter. ... To me it is utterly basic yet it seems like it's a great secret.
Leon Uris
...The means of choice:She might choose to ascendThe falling dream,By some angelic power without a nameReverse the motion, plunge into upwardness,Know height without an end,Density melt to air, silence yield a voice--Within her fall she felt the pull of Grace.
May Sarton
As I see it, you’re always unsteady on your legs. You can’t find your courage. You’ll go to any length to avoid what displeases you, and you gallop after whatever you want. And why is that? There is no why; it’s because you’re free to. You enjoy the luxury of picking and choosing because you have the latitude. You’re never pushed into a tight corner as I am, so it never occurs to you to thumb your nose at the world.
Sōseki Natsume
We walked on the moon. We made footprints somewhere no one else had ever made footprints, and unless someone comes and rubs them out, those footprints will be there forever because there’s no wind.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
You know what I think? Fate! That's what it is fate! There's a thing that comes after a fellow:got a name,but I forgot what it is. Creeps up behind him, and puts him in the basket when he ain't expecting it.
Georgette Heyer
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
John Irving
Someday, Chinmay, perhaps when you are as old as I am, you will realize that we calibrate time as per our own convenience. The dates on the calendar do not matter by themselves, nor do the numbers on the clock. Only this moment counts, this moment alone, and that is because of the awareness that we bring to it.
Indu Muralidharan
There is no room for pride in any man. There is no room for unkindness. There is no room for wit at the expense of others. All men are born the same, and equal. As you saw to-day, so come the Captains and the Kings and the Tinkers and the Tailors.
Richard Llewellyn
It's not something a kid like you should've gotten ahold of.
Shinjirou
Man is not the creature of circumstances circumstances are the creature of man. We are free agents and man is more powerful than matter.
Benjamin Disraeli
Maybe it wasn't a good idea to rank the people in your life. That's not how the heart worked. The heart didn't make lists.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Maybe I'll obey the rules. Some of them, anyway, who knows? What are you going to do if I don't, by the way, and haven't I asked you this before?
Anne Rice