Quotes by Novelists - Page 75

Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.
John Fowles
God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.
Laurence Sterne
You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, "We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is...frozen.
Pico Iyer
Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers.
Walter Tevis
All cat stories start with the statement: 'My mother, who was the first cat, told me this,' and I lay with Jonas listening to his stories.
Shirley Jackson
Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We'll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there'll be a law not to live in houses, so then no one can hide from anyone else, you see.
Shirley Jackson
There are two things in life you cannot choose. The first is your enemies; the second your family. Sometimes the difference between them is hard to see, but in the end time will show you that the cards you have been dealt could always have been worse.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A sense of the value of time ... is an essential preliminary to efficient work it is the only method of avoiding hurry.
Arnold Bennett
How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Theodore Dreiser
It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars...The upside was that the city was inexpensive…
Edmund White
He was naked as a jaybird and covered in filth. He moved towards her with the same eerie grace that he had scaled the side of the barn, stopping to sniff the wind and look suspiciously around...His eyes were not yellow now; they were as black as his hair.
Shirley A. Martin
All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I'd tried to complete my life with someone else--first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn't want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.
Sue Monk Kidd
The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men.
Joseph Conrad
Y'all think a body be who you is, but it ain't nothing but a motherfucking sack of meat.
James Hannaham
Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing.
Anne Rice
But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.
Robert Graves
When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.
Theodore Dreiser
In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.
John Fowles
Ah, but prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves,' Khayman said. 'That's the magic of it. We all understood it in ancient times. The power of charms is the power of the will; you might say that we were all geniuses of psychology in those dark days, that we could be slain by the power of another's designs. And the dreams, Marius, the dreams are but a part of the great design.
Anne Rice
I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you ask them who is brave--who is true--who is just--who is it they would trust with their lives?--they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth....
Joseph Conrad
In fact, she [Pamela Flitton] seemed to prefer 'older men' on the whole, possibly because of their potentiality for deeper suffering. Young men might superficially transcend their seniors in this respect, but they probably showed less endurance in sustaining that state, while, once pinioned, the middle-aged could be made to writhe almost indefinitely.
Anthony Powell
I was like you once, long time ago. I believed in the dignity of man. Decency. Humanity. But I was lucky. I found out the truth early, boy.And what is the truth, Stark? It's all very simple. There's no such thing as the dignity of man. Man is a base, pathetic and vulgar animal.
Charles G. Finney
Americans no longer experience vacations. They simply Sony them so they can ignore them for the rest of the year.
John Grisham
If they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
Gabriel García Márquez
Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?”“That is the only time a man can be brave,
George R.R. Martin
It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was areal mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was butone mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed andchanged into itself over and over.
Leonard Cohen
Everything passed, and what trace of its passage remained? It seemed to Kitty that they were all, the human race, like the drops of water in that river and they flowed on, each so close to the other and yet so far apart, a nameless flood, to the sea. When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy.
W Somerset Maugham
This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind.
Hilary Mantel
I'm speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I'm speaking of those who won't accept a useless life just because they were born to it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things..." He was moved by this, and I was a little surprised that I'd said it. Yet I felt I'd had hurt him somehow. "There is blessedness in that." I said. "There's sanctity. And God or no God, there is goodness in it. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine.
Anne Rice
The Creator made women to please the eye, and to boggle the mind.
Robert Jordan
One hour of life crowded to the full with glorious action and filled with noble risks is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum.
Walter Scott
Kissing don't last: cookery do.
George Meredith
Then there was Jeannot, who was reminded of another war and who was discovering inside himself the roots of a mad hopefulness that made him want to believe that the present hour might appease the torture of memories, and he could again see the paths of his life opening up before him, paths that came to an abrupt end the day he saw his brother die. Every morning he got up to face this wound that no one could see, and he drank his wine and laughed at stories, and his soul was more bare than a rosebush in winter.
Muriel Barbery
The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.
Sinclair Lewis
Still, beauty can mask deadly danger.
George R.R. Martin
Please don't entertain for a moment the utterly mistaken idea that there is no drudgery in writing. There is a great deal of drudgery in even the most inspired, the most noble, the most distinguished writing. Read what the great ones have said about their jobs; how they never sit down to their work without a sigh of distress and never get up from it witout a sigh of relief. Do you imagine that your Muse is forever flamelike -- breathing the inspired word, the wonderful situation, the superb solution into your attentive ear? ... Believe me, my poor boy, if you wait for inspiration in our set-up, you'll wait for ever.
Ngaio Marsh
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
Honoré de Balzac
My father was one of those men who sit in a room and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable force that might, at any moment, break loose, and do something terrible. [Burnside, p. 27]
John Burnside
Poor Mr. Smith, having been so rudely dragged from his high horse, was never able to mount it again, and completed the lecture in a manner not at all comfortable to himself.
Anthony Trollope
Fear not! I would rather tear the heart from your bosom than take your bow, for I believe you would miss it less.
Anne Fortier
At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have told him: that his happiness was not the point, or that it wasn't as important as his usefulness.
John Irving
Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.
Pico Iyer
The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.
Jean Lorrain
If you write a line of zeroes, it´s still nothing.
Ayn Rand
Recalling former years’ romances,Recalling love that time enhances,With tenderness, with not a care,Alive, at liberty once more,We drank, in mute intoxication,The breath of the indulgent night!Just as a sleepy convict mightBe carried from incarcerationInto a greenwood, so were weBorne to our youth by reverie.
Alexander Pushkin
He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him, and say, 'You prick.
Hilary Mantel
There was still one response, the greatest, that she had missed. She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth... To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his... No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience.
Ayn Rand
I'm a born liar myself and I know how it's done. You stick as close to the truth as you can. You pretend to volunteer a few bits of information, but the facts are all carefully selected for effect.
Sue Grafton
He’d had a few sordid gay experiences. He’d wrestled with an obese neighbour boy in Clermont-Ferrand when he was fourteen and last year had been approached in the Clermont-Ferrand train station loo by an obscene old man who’d removed his dentures, wagged his tongue, and pointed to his open, pulsing mouth.
Edmund White
You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.
David Markson
Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.
William Maxwell
Glorious is the Voice of Man, and sweet is the music of the harp.
Richard Llewellyn
I feel no peace, I feel nothing. I think I will feel nothing forever.
Philippa Gregory
This misfortune you find is of your own manufacture.Keep hold of what you have, it will harm no other,for hatred comes home to the hand that chose it.
Simon Armitage
I hope people don't take kittens on a whim, like they would a toy, then not care for them.
Shirley Rousseau Murphy
...he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.
Ayn Rand
There was something wild about her, as if she was connected to this place but not the people.
David Metzenthen
Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
Gustave Flaubert
Worry is a god invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse it takes away the appetite and turns the hair gray.
Benjamin Disraeli
For what can the damned really have to say to the damned?
Anne Rice