Quotes by Novelists - Page 68

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?
May Sarton
Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.
Nadeem Aslam
To believe a thing is not to make it true.
Robert Jordan
One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him.
Thomas Mann
Heaven help us! The girls have only to turn the tables,and say of one of their own sex,'She is as vain as a man,' and they will have perfect reason. The bearded creatures are quite as eager for praise, quite as finikin over their toilets, quite as proud of their personal advantages, quite as conscious of their powers of fascinations, as any coquette in the world.
William Makepeace Thackeray
The gods made our bodies as well as our souls, is it not so? They give us voices, so we might worship them with song. They give us hands, so we might build them temples. And they give us desire, so we might mate and worship them in that way.
George R.R. Martin
He knew that the dread in these men’s minds was not of the fact, but of his naming it—as if the fact had not existed, but his words held the power to make it exist.
Ayn Rand
Each day is a dry leaf, which never comes back to life again.
Shine Syamaladevi
Once she had loved Prince Joffrey with all her heart, and admired and trusted her his mother, the queen. They had repaid that love and trust with her father's head. Sansa would never make that mistake again.
George R.R. Martin
We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
Honoré de Balzac
Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.
Gustave Flaubert
Half the urge to write is the premonition that later the thought I am having might disappear so I had better write it down while I still have the inclination, however overshadowed this desire is by indolence.
Wayne Koestenbaum
And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.
Joseph Conrad
He looked like some plant bleached by darkness.
Honoré de Balzac
It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners - to live i n and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space clarity & hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment.
Wallace Stegner
I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.
Ayn Rand
Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that?
John Fowles
...we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.
Muriel Barbery
One can show one's contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one's life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.
Alfred Jarry
Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework.
Françoise Sagan
It's not," Mormont told him. "Gods save us, boy, you're not blind and you're not stupid. When dead men come hunting in the night, do you think it matters who sits the Iron Throne?
George R.R. Martin
‎Without a knowledge of where words come from, things disappear, history is lost.
Patrick Lane
Information age. I guess I'm part of it, even if I can't remember how to use my iPhone from week to week, and have to learn how to send e-mails all over again every couple of years, and can't retain any profound technological knowledge about the computers I sometimes use.
Anne Rice
James does what anybody would do when they see somebody they'd like to know: he ignores the shit out of her.
Imogen Binnie
Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
Tim O'Brien
Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.
Adam Zagajewski
Mama:...you can keep trying. You can get brave and try some more. You don't have to give up.Jessie: I'm NOT giving up. This IS the other thing I'm trying. And I'm sure there are some other things that might work, but MIGHT work isn't good enough any more. I need something that WILL work. THIS will work. That's why I picked it.
Marsha Norman
I think, therefore I am. My fingers that caress these rose and frangipani petals are a result of my thoughts. I feel content, tender. I feel entranced, ecstatic and besotted by the fragrance of the flowers and this is because of my thoughts.
Mohamed Latiff Mohamed
To Senor Sempere, the best friend a book could ever have: you opened the doors to the world for me and showed me how to go through them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The soles of his shoes are worn the way the edges of erasers become rounded with use. As though he walks around correcting his mistakes.
Nadeem Aslam
Well, what was I to do? For the well-bred gentleman there was clearly only one recourse. I fucked him.
Mark Gatiss
There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.
Joseph Conrad
I have forgotten more of my life than I remember, and with my forgetting I have lost my being.
Russell Hoban
Now and again. Good residency is about having the power to ask someone to do something, but not necessarily exercising it.
Jasper Fforde
Why have the English remained to English? Throughout India's history conquerors have come from elsewhere, and all of them --- Turk, Arab, Hun, Mongol, Persian --- have become Indian. If --- when ---this Pakistan happens, those Muslims who leave Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad to go there, They will be leaving their homes. But when the English leave, they'll be going home.
Kamila Shamsie
And if I were to open you up - would you see anything less remarkable? Less intricately dazzling, in its squelching, spongy way? Lungs and heart and spleen, and all the rest - ticking away, as it were? Yet you walk down the boulevard, and pass any number of such wonderful devices, all ticking away as they walk, and think it no great marvel.
K.W. Jeter
The nationalism of a small nation can, with treacherous ease, become detached from its roots in what is noble and human. It then become pitiful, making the nation appear smaller rather than greater. It is the same with nations as with individuals; while trying to draw attention to the inadequacies of others, people all too often reveal their own.
Vasily Grossman
Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.
Anne Michaels
No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.
Gabriel García Márquez
I tell you that what has changed is the whole conception of human life- that men of every race on this earth may have the same opportunity to live beautifully- to live in purity without fear or hunger or hatred- as brothers, not as brutes tearing through these hideous swamps of ignorance and war. Men speak of a belief in God. I am beginning to understand what every Christ- and their skins have been every color- what every Christ has taught: That love of God is love of mankind. That no one can profess to love God while he hates the least of his fellows. Jesus, if He were on earth right now, would fight to free men from oppression and evil and war; and you who have made a pious mockery of his every commandment- you would kill Him.
Kenneth Patchen
How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?
Walker Percy
Welcome as the flowers in May.
Walter Scott
Let us leave political questions to be decided by the powers concerned," Sir Ralph would say, "as we have adopted a form of government which forbids us to discuss our interests ourselves. If a nation is responsible for the faults of its legislature, what one can you find that is guiltier than yours?
George Sand
No medicine cures what happiness cannot.
Gabriel García Márquez
There are gods and there are true knights too. All the stories can't be lies.
George R.R. Martin
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just to enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed to interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard. Because you often feel like interfering—you want to be the one who makes the plans. . . You can’t protect people, kiddo, all you can do is love them.
John Irving
he began to feel that she was very lonely indeed. “If he’d been here,” she said, “those cowards would never have dared to insult me.” She thought about “him” with great sadness and perhaps longing--about his honest, stupid, constant kindness and fidelity; his never-ceasing obedience; his good humour; his bravery and courage. Very likely she cried, for she was particularly lively, and had put on a little extra rouge, when she came down to dinner.
William Makepeace Thackeray
The poor are very well off, at least the agricultural poor, very well off indeed. Their incomes are certain, that is a great point, and they have no cares, no anxieties; they always have a resource, they always have the House. People without cares do not require as much food as those whose life entails anxieties. See how long they live!
Benjamin Disraeli
My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.
George R.R. Martin
My smile is my servant, he should come at my command.
George R.R. Martin
Miss Grantham's sense of humour got the better of her at this point, and, tottering towards a chair, she sank into it, exclaiming in tragic accents:'Oh Heavens! I am betrayed!' His lordship blenched; both he and Miss Laxton regarded her with guilty dismay. Miss Grantham buried her face in her handkerchief, and uttered one shattering word: 'Wretch!
Georgette Heyer
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Anne Michaels
If you really want peace in any world you have to learn to say nothing.
Anne Rice
...legal procedure has always tacitly been concerned with human relations, rather than abstract justice, and that consequently in spite of the legal codes it is really the human relations underneath that determine the verdicts in the courts.
James Jones
...if you do not even understand what words say,how can you expect to pass judgementon what words conceal?
H.D.
Then there was this freedom the little guys were always getting killed for. Was it freedom from another country? Freedom from work or disease or death? Freedom from your mother-in-law? Please mister give us a bill of sale on this freedom before we go out and get killed. Give us a bill of sale drawn up plainly in advance what we're getting killed for... so we can be sure after we've won your war that we've got the same kind of freedom we bargained for.
Dalton Trumbo
...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.
José Saramago
It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience . . .
George Gissing