Quotes by Novelists - Page 73

And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
Thomas Mann
Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker.
Gustave Flaubert
My house seems remarkably full of people," he observed. "Is it possible we were expected.
Georgette Heyer
He was a good boy and ‘projected’ goodness – which later would be the downfall of many a person.
Edmund White
Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.
Herman Wouk
Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.
W Somerset Maugham
People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.
Heather O'Neill
The people are suffering. Relieving people’s poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate.
Kim Stanley Robinson
world is small to hate but very big to love
shivank sagar
Try it again," I said. "Kiss me.""No," he said."Kis
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this was the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. Marika was beckoning from the other side.
Heather O'Neill
But if Frederica was aware of my sentiments, and begged Cousin Alverstoke to intervene—!” She shuddered, and clasped her hands tensely together. “You see, he could, Harry! He could arrange for Endymion to be sent abroad, for instance, and then I think I should die. Oh, my dear brother, there’s no one to help us but you, and I count on your support!
Georgette Heyer
It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.
Shirley Jackson
Cordelia loved his explanations. She loved knowing words that belonged to things she'd never seen, even to things you couldn't see at all. She remembered those words carefully. "Magic," George had said, "is something unnatural, something that doesn't really exist. If I snap my fingers and Othello suddenly turns white, that's magic. If I fetch a bucket of paint and paint him white, it isn't." He laughed, and for a moment it looked as if he felt like snapping his fingers or fetching that bucket. Then he went on, "Everything that looks like magic is really a trick. There's no such thing as magic." Cordelia grazed with relish. "Magic" was her favorite word - for something that didn't exist at all.
Leonie Swann
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices.
Joseph Conrad
How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
Lawrence Durrell
Language is a bountiful gift and its usage, an elaboration of community and society, is a sacred work. Language and usage evolve over time: elements change, are reborn or forgotten, and while there are instances where transgression can become the source of an even greater wealth, this does not alter the fact that to become entitled to the liberties of playfulness or enlightened misuse of language, one must first and foremost have sworn one's total allegiance.
Muriel Barbery
And what makes humans so sure that thinking is the most important activity in the universe?...I on the contrary have never forgotten that first I existed and then, with a lot of difficulty, I learned to think." (p. 31)
Sabina Berman
Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo The Last Puritan and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
George Santayana
I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive.
John Fowles
Hold fast to dreamsfor if dreams dielife is a broken-winged birdthat can not fly.Hold fast to dreamsfor when dreams golife is a barren fieldfrozen with snow.
Langston Hughes
We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
William Golding
When fate's got it in for you there's no limit to what you may have to put up with.
Georgette Heyer
The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.
Gabriel García Márquez
He was a poet -oh all men are when they're in love.
Eric Gamalinda
Evil is a point of view ... God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately ... for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves.God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are none so like him as ourselves.
Anne Rice
Communication between people of different nationalities enriches human society and makes it more colourful.. Imagine our Russian intellectuals, the kind, merry, perceptive old women in our villages, our elderly workers, our young lads, our little girls being free to enter the melting pot of ordinary human intercourse with the people of North and South America, of China, France, India, Britain and the Congo. What a rich variety of customs, fashion, cuisine and labour would then be revealed! what a wonderful human community would then come into being, emerging out of so many peculiarities of national characters and ways of life. And the beggarliness, blindness and inhumanity of narrow nationalism and hostility between states would be clearly demonstrated.
Vasily Grossman
Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else - pathway to the stars, maybe.
Wallace Stegner
Poor men ... always make love better than those who are rich, because, having less to care about, and not being puffed up with their own consequence, they are not so selfish and think much more of the lady than of themselves.
Frederick Marryat
But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams, a demon elf feeding her spinning wheel with the reeds of the world so she might make her own weblike universe.
Anne Rice
The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.
Thomas Mann
like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse—they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted.
James Hannaham
And isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison.
Ayn Rand
I prayed in silence that perhaps even now, the queen might have a son and might know joy like this, such a strange, unexpected joy- the happiness of caring for a child whose whole life was in my hands.
Philippa Gregory
Time — how it expands to fill the spaces you create; how it makes meagre experiences seem never-ending. Whenever he heard people talk about the ravages of time, about how it robbed and deprived, Justin always smiled; because for him, time was an accomplice, plugging the gaps and fleshing out morsels of memory so he would have something substantial to hang on to. That way, however little he had seen or felt, he would always feel as if he had more: a life far richer than the truth.
Tash Aw
People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.
Joshua Ferris
The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.
William H. Gass
If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.
François Mauriac
He is so beautiful," she thought, aching from the sadness that she saw in his eyes. In the late-afternoon sunlight, those eyes were almost green. She took his face in her hands and pulled him to her, claiming the kiss she had so desperately wanted the day before but had forgotten in the heat of the moment. She closed her eyes and felt him respond to her mouth, his tongue seeking hers.
Shira Anthony
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.
George Meredith
Whether they loved each other or not, they were lovers. And he was damned if he'd see her sucked into this brutal business.
Alan Furst
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
Thomas Mann
At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver
Gustave Flaubert
...some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not.
W Somerset Maugham
We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.
Jean Genet
Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.
Carlos Fuentes
Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice…It demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an isolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold a man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality…To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. (The) myth decleares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being…The evils for which they damn him are reasn, morality, creativeness, joy-all the cardinal values of his existence….the essence of his nature as a man. Whatever he was- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love- he was not a man.
Ayn Rand
Remember that everything that is good, whatever it’s origin, comes from the holy spirit.
Gabriel García Márquez
The cadence of suffering has begun.
Cesare Pavese
But what worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death." He laid his glasses on the bed and took off his watch and chain. "What worries me," he went on, "is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.
Gabriel García Márquez
...his words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the iluminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.
Joseph Conrad
Defying the Dark One no matter the length of his shadow. We will live, that defiance said. We will love and we will hope.
Robert Jordan
The ferocity of Santiago Nasar's fate, which had collected twenty years of happiness from him not only with his death but also with the dismemberment of his body and its dispersion and extermination.
Gabriel García Márquez
Tell me,' asked Stas, 'what is a wicked deed?' 'If anyone takes away Kali's cow,' he answered after a brief reflection, 'that then is a wicked deed.' 'Excellent!' exclaimed Stas, 'and what is a good one?' This time the answer came without any reflection: 'If Kali takes away the cow of somebody else, that is a good deed.' Stas was too young to perceive that similar views of evil and good deeds were enunciated in Europe not only by politicians but by whole nations.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Do you think the Goblin King really did it?" asked Cordelia hesitantly. All the sheep knew she was talking about George's death. Mopple quickly pulled up a tuft of grass."Or Satan?" added Lane."Nonsense," Rameses snorted nervously. "Satan would never do a thing like that."several of the sheep bleated in agreement. None of them thought Satan capable of such an act. Satan was an elderly donkey who sometimes grazed in the meadow next to theirs, and uttered blood-curdling cries. his voice was truly dreadful, but otherwise he'd always struck them as harmless.
Leonie Swann
No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.
Edward St. Aubyn
I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.
Sue Monk Kidd
Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton
No man can be satisfied with his attainment although he may be satisfied with his circumstances.
Frank Swinnerton
Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.
Carlos Fuentes