Quotes by Novelists - Page 70

You are consciousness itself -- not the objects of consciousness. They used clear-color prisms and waterdrums to help him relax. You have a body, but you are not your body. You are the awareness of your body. You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts. You have feelings, but you are not they. Who are you?
A.A. Attanasio
Okay, this is the wisdom. First, time spent on reconnaissanse is never wasted. Second, almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon. And finally, there is no problem on Earth that can't be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea.
Jasper Fforde
Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that's ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.
Anne Rice
He [Muffat] experienced a sense of pleasure mingled with remorse, the sort of pleasure peculiar to those Catholics whom the fear of hell spurs on to commit sin.
Émile Zola
This is glorious!' I cried, and then i looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said 'Yes', without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.
Joseph Conrad
Suffering is the fuel in the engine of civilization."-Vergere
Matthew Woodring Stover
Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.
Jasper Fforde
What if the drive to survive was a form of faith, a form of prayer?
Anne Rice
It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood.
Wallace Stegner
And Sarah still looked like the sexiest librarian on earth, which is as those of you who frequent libraries know means very sexy indeed, but with that added owlish touch that drives you wild.
Kim Stanley Robinson
A woman never sees what we do for her she only sees what we don't do.
Georges Courteline
To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,--while society fraternity is based on resemblances.The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul, -and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which Andre Gide belongs.The misfortune of these beings, when they express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar & almost understood, as parchments are seen & read above sealed cases.
Rémy de Gourmont
The viola and the clarinet made for an interesting pairing: we had to imagine the accompaniment of other instruments, ideally a violin and a cello.
Nicholas Christopher
Most of us knew things that we didn't even want to confess to ourselves, so we took those secrets with us like condoms, stuffed in wallets, that would never be used.
David Joy
Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.
Arthur Somers Roche
He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.
W Somerset Maugham
Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.
Gustave Flaubert
This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period.
Leon Uris
Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory.
Théophile Gautier
Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he will always see that word: murder—immortally inscribed upon the pediment of that vast slaughterhouse—humanity.
Octave Mirbeau
We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.
Leonora Carrington
We do not remember days we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese
There was as much joy in surrendering free will as exercising it.
Daryl Gregory
God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil....
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.
Robert Graves
Henry knew sin was a challenge to life; not an act of unreason, but an act of courage and determination.
John Fowles
A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it's this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want and a new name if it's cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It's the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else.
Russell Banks
Your addiction to thinking will come back to haunt you.
Sōseki Natsume
It did not last long. It is only in the movies that knife fighters stab and miss and slash and miss and tussle over several city blocks.
James Jones
God is a creative force, Lestat. And so are we. He told Adam, 'Increase and multiply.' That's what the first organic cells did, Lestat, increased and multiplied. Not merely changed shape but replicated themselves. God is a creative force. He made the whole universe out of Himself through cell division. That's why the devils are so full of envy-the bad angels, I mean. They are [i]not[/i] creative creatures; they have no bodies, no cells, they're spirit. And I suspect it wasn't envy so much as a form of suspicion-that God was making a mistake in making another engine of creativity in Adam, so like Himself. I mean the angels probably felt the physical universe was bad enough, with all the replicating cells, but thinking, talking beings who could increase and multiply? They were probably outraged by the whole experiment. That was their sin.""So you're saying God isn't pure spirit.""That's right. God has a body. Always did. The secret of cell-dividing life lies within God. And all living cells have a tiny part of God's spirit in them, Lestat, that's the missing piece as to what makes life happen in the first place, what separates it from nonlife. It's exactly like your vampiric genesis. You told us that the spirit of Amel-the evil entity-infused the bodies of all the vampires...Well, men share in the spirit of God in the same way.
Anne Rice
An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.
Alberto Moravia
You’re so beautiful, Dominique. Its such a lovely accident on God’s part that there’s one person who matches inside and out.
Ayn Rand
Tribal Chief 1: The will of the people is what is best. That is what democracy meansTribal Chief 2: But if the people don’t know what they are talking about, how can that be the best?
Leonard Wibberley
It always matters who the storyteller is. It’s a lens.
James Still
I've seen men die because they were sure that what should not happen,would not.-Robert Jordan(The eye of the world,Wheel of time)
Robert Jordan
If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she desired to enjoy a character for virtue, and we know that no lady in the genteel world can possess this desideratum, until she has put on a train and feathers and has been presented to her Sovereign at Court. From that august interview they come out stamped as honest women. The Lord Chamberlain gives them a certificate of virtue.
William Makepeace Thackeray
It started to rain and we just sat. Sat and watched the rain in silence.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
To some extent the history of plagiarism is a history of notebooks.
Thomas Mallon
...the most sacred right of a person is to refuse o be manipulated, handled, cheated, and then kicked in the ass---.
Romain Gary
That love, which is the highest joy, which is divine simplicity itself, is not for you moderns, you children of reflection. It works only evil in you. As soon as you wish to be natural, you becomecommon. To you nature seems something hostile; you have made devils out of the smiling gods of Greece, and out of me a demon. You can only exorcise and curse me, or slay yourselves in bacchantic madness before my altar. And if ever one of you has had the courage to kiss my red mouth, he makes a barefoot pilgrimage to Rome in penitential robes and expects flowers to grow from his withered staff, while under my feet roses, violets, and myrtles spring up every hour, but their fragrance does not agree with you. Stay among your northern fogs and Christian incense; let us pagans remain under the debris, beneath the lava; do not disinter us.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Does one really have to fretAbout enlightenment?No matter what road I travel,I’m going home.
Shinsho
Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable? One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others--the minted round of metal. And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.
George Gissing
. . . at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people - bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.
Dennis Potter
When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?
John Irving
The things we love destroy us every time, lad. Remember that.
George R.R. Martin
He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled.
Tim O'Brien
Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress I was wearing. I made a sound with my lips like I was trying to give him an answer, but choking on the words, seized by my grief, and I didn't have to pretend that much. I felt sorrow for my life, for what I'd lived and seen and known, for what was lost to me, and the weeping turned real.
Sue Monk Kidd
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
George Santayana
A man can own a woman or a man can own a knife, but no man can own both.
George R.R. Martin
I crossed a thousand leagues to come to you, and lost the best part of me along the way. Don't tell me to leave.
George R.R. Martin
-Хүү минь, чи надад ямар ч өргүй гэж бодож явах эрхийг би чамд олголоо.
Honoré de Balzac
He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful graces of God.
William Kent Krueger
Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams...
Joseph Conrad
Genuine bravery for a writer.... It is about calmly speaking the truth when everyone else is silenced, when the truth cannot be expressed. It is about speaking out with a different voice, risking the wrath of the state and offending everyone, for the sake of the truth, and the writer’s conscience.
Murong Xuecun
Execution is everything. Even if you start a business with the wrong idea or too many competitors, you can out-execute all the better ideas in the right market.
Robert Jordan
Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.
John Fowles
All we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
Charles Kingsley
One of the things that I have learned, one of the attainments of the long travails and tribulations, has been, I think, coming to a simpler sense of myself that I think correlates to a simpler sense of others. Something closer to what I now call the simple sense of being human, a sort of Wallace Stevens-esque formulation. I know that I can reach this in the audience, because when they start hearing a story, they wake up in this very clear, simple way. Almost like children. It’s the same thing: a child asks, “What’s going to happen next?” When they sense that a story is being told to them, they wake up. When they sense that it’s not being told anymore, they lose interest. I take this very seriously, because the sacred trust that allows openness is the precondition of the kind of exchange I want to have, the kind of relationship that I want to have. I don’t want to test that simple sense of being human. I don’t want to transform it.
Ayad Akhtar
Growing old - it's not nice but it's interesting.
August Strindberg