Quotes by Novelists - Page 67

The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love.
John Fowles
Everything is worse...if you think something is looking at you.
Shirley Jackson
But remember the overall lesson, that your love for others, and their love for you, that the increase of love in life itself around you, is what matters.
Anne Rice
I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.
C.P. Snow
Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets--as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her--and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris.
Anne Rice
I hated this love that I had for my family—love that demanded my time and energy, that sought to control my life down to every thought and action.I now realize that it was not love but an unhealthy attachment, born out of a need for security and a sense of duty.
Indu Muralidharan
Unknown situations offer us opportunities for fresh learning. When we judge these situations solely by our conscious logic, fear grips us; we turn these opportunities down. We close ourselves from new experiences. We stagnate.On the contrary, when we embrace these opportunities, we force our intuition to work in the face of risks. And then, when we observe our perceptions, actions, and reactions in these situations, we see our evolution. We break out of our limits.
Indrajit Garai
The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest killing device of contemporary times.
Wole Soyinka
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
Thomas Mann
When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice.
Anne Michaels
It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.
Edna O'Brien
What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?
C.L.R. James
Please never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.
Alexander Pushkin
Man's meanness is a fuse in search of a flame.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Clara looked at Maria and tried to understand what she must do so that Maria would be able to see her. But the little French girl cast all around her the bronze of infinite solitude.
Muriel Barbery
Yes, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark.
Walter de la Mare
By vice, dissipation, and extravagance, [the nobility] have been driven to the most despicable, and often the most atrocious actions, for which persons in a humble line would be exemplarily punished, while men and women of rank claim the privilege of being infamous.
Eliza Parsons
Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
Thornton Wilder
If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them?
Amitav Ghosh
It is strange how loud little sounds become when you are in the dark and doing something wrong.
Richard Llewellyn
Here are all these people, full of heartache or hatred or desire, and we all have our troubles and the school year is filled with vulgarity and triviality and consequence, and there are all these teachers and kids of every shape and size, and there's this life we're struggling through full of shouting and tears and fights and break-ups and dashed hopes and unexpected luck -- it all disappears, just like that, when the choir begins to sing. Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of brotherhood, of deep solidarity, even love, and it diffuses the ugliness of everyday life into a spirit of perfect communion.
Muriel Barbery
The comic book is not the book. the graphic novel is not the novel. The same, of course, is true of films and television. When we move a story from one medium to another, no matter how faithful we attempt to be, some changes are inevitable. Each medium has its own demands, own restrictions, its own way of telling a story.
George R.R. Martin
A hound will die for you, but never lie to you.
George R.R. Martin
Demander à la poésie du sentimentalisme ... ce n'est pas ça. Des mots rayonnants, des mots de lumière ... avec un rythme et une musique, voilà ce que c'est, la poésie.
Théophile Gautier
Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing.
Benjamin Disraeli
Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption also.
William Gilmore Simms
The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.
William Golding
A man's work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, but in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. No one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.
W Somerset Maugham
Good literature is a mirror through which we see ourselves more clearly.
Mark Frost
The fluid boundary between individuals and types is a true concern of the real writer.
Elias Canetti
The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance the farther there is to go and the more there is to say the less time there is to say it.
Gabrielle Roy
Perhaps with age came a more sedate appreciation of the passage of time.
Tim Lebbon
Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it's the shutting of the door that makes the difference. Solitude is a time for stripping away everything in order to focus on God. (Matt 6:6)
Sue Monk Kidd
It hurt to think that a boy would not have him at his value of himself.
Richard Llewellyn
For now, let us simply observe that the assault on human dignity is one of the prime goals of the visitation of fear, a prelude to the domination of the mind and the triumph of power
Wole Soyinka
Now he had chanced on one of he standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across the room three queens sported horizontal members which they turned around from time to time to conceal or display, barely exchanging looks as they resolved. The old men took no interest in this activity, knowing perhaps from long experience that it rarely meant anything or led anywhere, was a brief and helpless surrender to the forcing-house of the shower. In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine.
Alan Hollinghurst
We knew not where we were going. We only knew that we must run, run to the end of the world, run to the end of our days.
Ayn Rand
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
Honoré de Balzac
I think the therapists around this place think that if you know yourself, then somehow you’ll be better and healthier and you’ll be able to leave this place and live out your days as a happy and loving human being. Happy. Loving. I hate those words. I’m supposed to like them. I’m supposed to want them. I don’t. Don’t like them, don’t want them. This is the way I see it: if you get to know yourself really well, you might discover that deep down inside you’re just a dirty, disgusting, and selfish piece of shit. What if my heart is all rotted out and corrupted? What about that? What am I supposed to do with that information? Just tell me that. Most of the time I get the feeling that I’m just an animal disguised as an eighteen-year-old guy. At least I’m hoping that maybe deep down inside I’m a coyote.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
our situation reminded me of a fable I had read somewhere. Chased by a tiger, a man slips and falls over the edge of a mountain. As he falls, he manages to grab a bush growing by the side of the mountain and hangs on to it for dear life. The bush is laden with wild strawberries that hang tantalizingly near his mouth. As the tiger snarls above his head and a gorge stretches beneath his dangling feet, the man takes a bite from a luscious berry. ‘How sweet,’ he exclaims as he relishes its taste.I do not remember the moral attached to the fable. It might have been a commentary on the ephemeral nature of life, on how foolish it is to imagine that there is happiness to be found in the world when death is certain and likely to happen at any time. Or it might have been an exhortation to seize the day and squeeze the most out of every moment, for, in any case, we areall going to die. It might have made a reasonably good ad for strawberries, which were so good that you simply had to eat them, even if it was the last thing you did.
Indu Muralidharan
A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
Thomas Mann
The quality of your awareness determines the quality of life you experience.
Shilpa Menon
The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.
Ayn Rand
... the best way of killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.
José Saramago
Half-truths are worth more than outright lies.
George R.R. Martin
There is sitting and there is sitting. (...) Each one waits for the other to move, but the lion is poised, his tail twitching, while the fawn is frozen by fear, bowels turned to belly. No matter which way he bounds, the lion will have him, and he knows it.
George R.R. Martin
Nature in her creative dreaming, dreamt the same thing both here and there, and if one spoke of imitation, then certainly it had to be reciprocal. Should one take the children of the soil as models because they possessed the depth of organic reality, whereas the ice flowers were mere external phenomena? But as phenomena, they were the result of an interplay of matter no less complex than that found in plants. If I understood our friendly host correctly, what concerned him was the unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, the idea that we sin against the latter if the boundary we draw between the two spheres is too rigid, when in reality it is porous, since there is no elementary capability that is reserved exclusively for living creatures or that the biologist could not likewise study on inanimate models.
Thomas Mann
Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
George Santayana
He would roam about the world carrying his recollections with him, and perhaps some day he would come to forget them, for one can live only by forgetting; but when his grief should dissolve with the years he would be left an empty man, like a smiling automaton, incapable of any affections other than meterial ones.
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it turned against the organism that bore it, strove to fathom and explain the very phenomenon that produced it, a hope-filled and hopeless striving of life to comprehend itself, as if nature were rummaging to find itself in itself - ultimately to no avail, since nature cannot be reduced to comprehension, nor in the end can life listen to itself.
Thomas Mann
Meantime the clang of the bows and the shouts of the combatants mixed fearfully with the sound of the trumpets, and drowned the groans of those who fell, and lay rolling defenceless beneath the feet of the horses. The splendid armour of the combatants was now defaced with dust and blood, and gave way at every stroke of the sword and battle-axe. The gay plumage, shorn from the crests, drifted upon the breeze like snowflakes. All that was beautiful in the martial array had disappeared, and what was now visibke was only calculated to awaken terror or compassion.
Walter Scott
Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, an encounter. Most encounters, however, have a sequel; this is their promise. The encounter with happiness has no sequel. All is there instantly. Happiness is what pierces grief.
John Berger
I don't need you to agree with me," she said quietly." I'll go away happy with a little bit of doubt. Doubt is good. It's an emotion we can build on. Perhaps if we feed it with curiosity it will blossom into something useful, like suspicion - and action.
Jasper Fforde
Do noble things do not dream them all day long.
Charles Kingsley
If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: ‘What’s great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!’ It will be about how the whole thing stands up.
George R.R. Martin
Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
W Somerset Maugham
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
George Santayana
I'm sick and tired of it," he said, "It's the same all the time. 'These are my claws, so this is my cowslip." 'These are my teeth, so this is my burrow.' I'll tell you, if I ever get into the Owsla, I'll treat outskirters with a bit of decency.
Richard Adams
Not many people understood the inherent pain of a career in heroics. Your body aches from the demands of day-to-day protection. Your mind whirs with the things you did wrong, the ways you could’ve done better, the scores of citizens you didn’t save. And when you lose someone you love, when their blood forms a puddle beneath your cheek while you watch… Your name, Watcher, becomes the cruelest agony of all.
Shirin Dubbin
The conversations of men had always been muddy rivers, the surface's roiling a reflection of what's buried, but the bottom some mysterious thing that would always be hidden.
David Joy