Quotes by Novelists - Page 74

Most people, when they move, well they just move depending on whatever's around them. At this very moment, as I am writing, Constitution the cat is going by with her tummy dragging close to the floor. This cat has absolutely nothing constructive to do in life and still she is heading toward something, probably an armchair.
Muriel Barbery
And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation, the more intensely the author worried about distinguishing himself from the narrator, the more he felt he had become him.
Ben Lerner
Because evil, my dear child, can be done to anyone and by everyone, but good can only be done to those who need it.
Luigi Pirandello
From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.
Sue Monk Kidd
Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.
Tim O'Brien
Beyond the YearsI the years the answer lies,Beyond where brood the grieving skies And Night drops tears.Where Faith rod-chastened smiles to rise And doff its fears,And carping Sorrow pines and dies— Beyond the years.IIBeyond the years the prayer for restShall beat no more within the breast; The darkness clears,And Morn perched on the mountain's crest Her form uprears—The day that is to come is best, Beyond the years.IIIBeyond the years the soul shall findThat endless peace for which it pined, For light appears,And to the eyes that still were blind With blood and tears,Their sight shall come all unconfined Beyond the years.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Never stop loving yourself, for how can you truly love someone if you don't love yourself first. And never be afraid to love, for it is one of the most beautiful uglist things of this world.
Adrian Ross
Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men.
Ayn Rand
There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either
Robert Graves
...homosexuality is the direct result of chastity in women.
James Jones
Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.
Gabriel García Márquez
The main trouble with being an honest man was that it lost you all your illusions.
James Jones
He tried not to laugh, but he wasn't good at controlling all the laughter that lived inside of him.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Shame has poor memory.
Gabriel García Márquez
Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers.
James Kelman
Here, the mother country is satisfied to keep some feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end; elsewhere she has played a double game: the colony is planted with settlers and exploited at the same time. Thus Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavoured by every means to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonised societies. Fanon hides nothing: in order to fight against us the former colony must fight against itself: or, rather, the two struggles form part of a whole.
Jean-Paul Sarte
If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
George Santayana
Born of the sun they travelled a short while towards the sun And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
Stephen Spender
she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.
Alan Hollinghurst
This, this indeed is to be accursed, For if we mortals love, or if we sing, We count our joys not by what we have, But by what kept us from that perfect thing.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Cancer may have blindsided you, but it didn't blindside God.~ Strength Renewed
Shirley Corder
The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.
Kim Stanley Robinson
I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!
Jasper Fforde
Healing is not a process, it is a choice. Nothing can heal your scars until you decide to.
Shilpa Menon
And once more given to inaction,Empty in spirit and alone,He settled down – to the distractionOf making other minds his own;Collecting books, he stacked a shelfful,Read, read, not even one was helpful:Here, there was dullness, there pretence;This one lacked conscience, that one sense;All were by different shackles fettered;And, past times having lost their hold,The new still raved about the old.Like women, books he now deserted,And mourning taffeta he drewAcross the bookshelf’s dusty crew.
Alexander Pushkin
My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
Gustave Flaubert
Under the sea the old fish eat the young fish.
George R.R. Martin
A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong?
Ayn Rand
I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity.The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.
Pico Iyer
When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.
Hilary Mantel
The avarice, the hunger for materialistic possessions and the dependency upon alcohol had gradually become stronger and stronger. And now, it was the sum total of what she was.
Sue Fortin
Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
Joseph Conrad
And he glanced down at Mercy beside him, and saw in her face such radiant goodness, such a calm certainty, that it seemed to him that if he could only be with her all his life, he should know a love, and happiness, and peace that he had never known before.
Edward Rutherfurd
This revolution - will it be a living?''We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I'm visiting a client. He's going to be hanged tomorrow.''Is that usual?''Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.
Hilary Mantel
The human mind is a lucky little local, passing accident which was totally unforeseen, and condemned to disappear with this earth and to recommence perhaps here or elsewhere the same or different with fresh combinations of eternally new beginnings. We owe it to this little lapse of intelligence on His part that we are very uncomfortable in this world which was not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive us, to lodge and feed us or to satisfy reflecting beings, and we owe it to Him also that we have to struggle without ceasing against what are still called the designs of Providence, when we are really refined and civilized beings.
Guy de Maupassant
Oh...why has time changed us?
Naguib Mahfouz
Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.
Ouida
But do you imagine there’s a certain type of person in the world who conforms to the idea of a ‘bad person'? You’ll never find someone who fits that mold neatly, you know. On the whole, all people are good, or at least they’re normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch. That’s why you have to be careful.
Sōseki Natsume
At five-thirty the rain began to fall in great, heavy drops which bounced off the pavement before they spread out into black spots. At the same time thunder rumbled from the direction of Charenton and an eddy of wind lifted the dust, carried away the hats of passers-by who took to their heels and who, after a few confused moments, were all in the shelter of doorways or under the awnings of cafe terraces. Street pedlars of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine scurried about with an apron or a sack over their heads, pushing their carts as they tried to run. Rivulets already began to flow along the two sides of the street, the gutters sang, and on every floor you could see people hurriedly closing their windows.
Georges Simenon
If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.
Tim O'Brien
It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.
W Somerset Maugham
The greatness of the enterprise does not always ensure success, but at least ensures glory.
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.
Muriel Barbery
But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.
Gustave Flaubert
Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness.
George Sand
What is difficulty? Only a word indicating the degree of strength requisite for accomplishing particular objects a mere notice of the necessity for exertion ... a mere stimulus to men.
Samuel Warren
My dear, how can I make you perceive that there is no danger where there is nothing but love and understanding?
Shirley Jackson
The innocent supposition, entertained by most people, that even if they are not brilliant, they are not dumb, is correct only in a very relative sense.
James Gould Cozzens
Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.
Georges Bernanos
Each of us can walk only the path he sees at his own feet. Each of us is subject to the consequences of his own belief.
Morris West
I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.
Gabriel García Márquez
There's a kind of release And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man.
C. Day Lewis
Time is precious but truth is more precious than time.
Benjamin Disraeli
My heart born nakedwas swaddled in lullabies.Later alone it worepoems for clothes.Like a shirtI carried on my backthe poetry I had read.So I lived for half a centuryuntil wordlessly we met.From my shirt on the back of the chairI learn tonighthow many yearsof learning by heartI waited for you.
John Berger
Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.
Ben Lerner
No fiction is good fiction unless it is true to life, and yet no life is worth relating unless it be a life out of the ordinary; and then it seems improbable like fiction.
William Gerhardie
Don't you remember that love, like medicine, is only the art of encouraging nature?
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Why is it a shame for me to cause them to die and try to exterminate them, tell me? You did not talk that way when you used to come to my house in Jeanne-d'Arc street. Ah! it is a shame! You have not done as much, with your cross of honor! I deserve more merit than you, do you understand, more than you, for I have killed more Prussians than you!
Guy de Maupassant
One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.
Paul Bourget
Til shade is gone, til water is goneInto the shadow with teeth baredScreaming defiance with the last breathTo spit in Sightblinder’s eye on the Last Day.
Robert Jordan