Quotes by Novelists - Page 65

I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.
Wilkie Collins
She didn't know that all her life would be spent gambling with the stark rigidity of words, words that were coin: save, spend and all the time George with his own counter had found her a way out.
H.D.
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
George Santayana
And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank
Joseph Conrad
No,” said Bran. “I haven’t. And if I have it doesn’t matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she’d told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.
George R.R. Martin
But now, you are twain, you are cloven apartFlesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
He’d meant to forgive his brother, maybe even imagined he had. He’d also meant to learn to trust him, but instead merely fell into the habit of waiting for him to fuck up again.
Richard Russo
Morality existed only in action. It arose out of action: was formed and tested in action: expressed itself in action. That was why we mustn't cheapen it with words
C.P. Snow
A house can have integrity, just like a person,' said Roark, 'and just as seldom.
Ayn Rand
The Mississippi and its paddle boats, and the rivers of Bengal and their gleaming steamers evoked a similar atmosphere of romance, of long, song-filled voyages, high winds and lonely sunsets.
Qurratulain Hyder
Mr. Buckley, let me explain it this way. And I'll do so very carefully and slowly so that even you will understand it. If I was the sheriff, I would not have arrested him. If I was on the grand jury, I would not have indicted him. If I was the judge, I would not try him. If I was the D.A., I would not prosecute him. If I was on the trial jury, I would vote to give him a key to the city, a plaque to hang on his wall, and I would send him home to his family. And, Mr. Buckley, if my daughter is ever raped, I hope I have the guts to do what he did.
John Grisham
A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.
John Berger
There are moments of despair that come sometimes, when night sets in and a white fog presses against the windows. Then our house changes its shape, rears up and becomes a place of despair. Then fear and rage run simply--and the thought of Death as a friend. This is the simplest of thoughts, that Death must come when we call, although he is a god.
Stevie Smith
Coming back to Karachi is like stepping into the sea again after months on land. How easily you float, how peaceful is the sense of being borne along, and how familiar the sound of the water lapping against your limbs.
Kamila Shamsie
World opinion, though sharply divided on nuclear tests and the risk of atmospheric pollution, could congratulate itself on being united in its opposition to cannibalism. No country in the world was prepared to support the custom of eating the dead, though the right of governments to kill people, individually or by hundreds of thousands, was not questioned for a moment.
Leonard Wibberley
She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing, if you couldn't give yourself?
Émile Zola
Holding the lamb in his arms, Jesus watched the people file past, some coming, some going, some carrying animals to be sacrificed, some returning without them, looking joyful and exclaiming, Alleluia, Hosanna, Amen, or saying none of these things, feeling it was inappropriate to walk around shouting Hallelujah or Hip hip hurrah, because there is really not much difference between the two expressions, we use them enthusiastically until with the passage of time and by dint of repetition we finally ask ourselves, What does it mean, only to find there is no answer.
José Saramago
The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.
George R.R. Martin
You talk as if Bea were a trophy.''No, as if she were a blessing,' Fermin corrected.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours. Then a day would pass in perfect harmony with our projects, our family members, and our coworkers, and we couldn’t believe we were getting paid for this.
Joshua Ferris
But godhead is, after all, a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion: if a man is generally worshipped as a god then he is a god. And if a god ceases to be worshipped he is nothing.
Robert Graves
It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. […] He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slopped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
W Somerset Maugham
Allow me to tell you, Mr Taylor," said I, but quietly as the occasion demanded, "that one gentleman does not rejoice at the misfortune of another in public".
William Golding
No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.
Benjamin Disraeli
Words are wind, and the wind from Manderly's mouth means no more than the wind escaping his bottom.
George R.R. Martin
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.
Ayn Rand
A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one.
William Makepeace Thackeray
There is a spirit greater than you, always within reach of you, but he only comes to take charge when your own spirit is lost, and cries out in his own tongue, which you cannot know but only feel, and it is in feeling that you will have orders. Yet not even in feeling, for I felt nothing, only surprise that I was going forward.
Richard Llewellyn
I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
Ayn Rand
The years I have squandered in puerile excitement, in going hither and thither, in seeking to force nature and time, I ought to have spent in solitude and meditation, in endeavoring to make myself worthy of being loved.
Théophile Gautier
Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds -justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.
Anne Rice
I don't remember much, which is a kind of mercy,I suppose. I see it in patterns.Sometimes it's like a scribble on a wall- no matter how many times you paint over it, a bit of it always comes through, but not enough to put together the whole.I try not to think about it too much.
Amitav Ghosh
Then you do not belong here. Death holds no sweetness in this house. We are not warriors, nor soldiers, nor swaggering bravos puffed up with pride. We do not kill to serve some lord, to fatten our purses, to stroke our vanity. We never give the gift to please ourselves. Nor do we choose the ones we kill. We are but servants of the God of Many Faces.""Valar dohaeris." All men must serve."You know the words, but you are too proud to serve. A servant must be humble and obedient.""I obey. I can be humbler than anyone."That made him chuckle. "You will be the very goddess of humility, I am sure. But can you pay the price?""What price?""The price is you. The price is all you have and all you ever hope to have. We took your eyes and gave them back. Next we will take your ears, and you will walk in silence. You will give us your legs and crawl. You will be no one's daughter, no one's wife, no one's mother. Your name will be a lie, and the very face you wear will not be your own.
George R.R. Martin
... he had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreamas were so much more intense than anything one could experience in waking reality—why the horror was so total and the ecstacy so complete—and what was that extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture—and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had just been a path through some woods.
Ayn Rand
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
Walker Percy
Ignorance breeds fear. Tell people the truth. Trust them to keep their heads.
Olivia Manning
I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.
Sue Monk Kidd
Charles went to kiss her shoulder.-Leave me alone! she said, you're creasing my dress.
Gustave Flaubert
Here too was the terrifying fixed curve of the infinite, the creeping curve of logic which at least must become the final signpost at the edge of nothing. After that - the deluge. The great white light of annihilation. The bright flash of death... ("Mr. Arcularis")
Conrad Aiken
Arya did not dare [take a bath], even though she smelled as bad as Yoren by now, all sour and stinky. Some of the creatures living in her clothes had come all the way from Flea Bottom with her; it didn’t seem right to drown them.
George R.R. Martin
When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.
Émile Zola
Normality; show me normality, señor caballero, and I will show you an exception to the abnormal order of the universe; show me a normal event and I shall call it miraculous because it is normal.
Carlos Fuentes
Feeling unable to maintain this detachment of attitude towards human- and, in especial, matrimonial- affairs, I asked whether it was not true that she had married Bob Duport. She nodded; not exactly conveying, it seemed to me, that by some happy chance their union had introduced her to an unexpected terrestrial paradise.
Anthony Powell
How pathetic it is to describe these things which can't truly be described.
Anne Rice
Nu exista pe lume leac care sa tamaduiasca ceea ce nu tamaduieste fericirea/ There is no cure in this world which heals what happiness does not heal.
Gabriel García Márquez
You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something.
Jasper Fforde
You noticed things. You're not sure when you start. It's only when you've noticed - noticed that you know you've noticed. Maybe between the first time when you're staring to think, Is this what I think it is? and the second time when you think, Yes, between those two times, there's a silence. A pause.
Jackie Kay
She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.
Anthony Trollope
Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
What an odd creature you are, Bernard, with your constant fear of death! Do you never have a feeling, as I do, of utter futility? No? Doesn't it occur to you that the sort of life people like us lead is remarkably like death?
François Mauriac
I want a world where hearts are not deceived and do not deceive others.
Naguib Mahfouz
I want a world where men live free from fear and coercion.
Naguib Mahfouz
Why not other elements besides fire, air, earth and water? There are four of them, just four, those foster parents of beings! What a pity! Why aren't there forty elements instead, or four hundred, or four thousand? How paltry everything is, how miserly, how wretched! Stingily given, aridly invented, heavily made!Why not other elements besides fire, air, earth and water? There are four of them, just four, those foster parents of beings! What a pity! Why aren't there forty elements instead, or four hundred, or four thousand? How paltry everything is, how miserly, how wretched! Stingily given, aridly invented, heavily made!
Guy de Maupassant
You can tease it's mane all you like, but you can't turn a house cat into a lion.
Anne Fortier
A book can be as dangerous as a sword in the right hands
George R.R. Martin
We're frightened of what makes us different.
Anne Rice
He could fiddle all the bugs off a sweet-potato vine.
Stephen Vincent Benét
Where music thundered let the mind be still,Where the will triumphed let there be no will,What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
May Sarton
Still, we permit the appearance of our meats, sauces, fruits, and vdgetables to dominate our tongues until it is difficult to divide a twist of lemon or squeeze of lime from the colors of their rinds or separate yellow from its yolk or chocolate from the quenchless brown which seems to be the root, shoot, stalk, and bloom of it. Yet I hardly think the eggplant's taste is as purple as its skin. In fact, there are few flavors at the violet end, odors either, for the acrid smell of blue smoke is deceiving, as is the tooth of the plum, though there may be just a hint of blue in the higher sauces. Perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. No watermelon tastes red. Apropos: while waiting for a bus once, I saw open down the arm of a midfat, midlife, freckled woman, suitcase tugging at her hand like a small boy needing to pee, a deep blue crack as wide as any in a Roquefort. Split like paper tearing. She said nothing. Stood. Blue bubbled up in the opening like tar. One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup.
William H. Gass
One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.
Carlos Fuentes