Quotes by Novelists - Page 8

His eyes were open wounds beneath his heavy brows, a blue as dark as the sea by night.
George R.R. Martin
But even of him I can think of with sorrow, now at this moment.Those times, those people...have gone. How can there be fury felt for things that are gone to dust.
Richard Llewellyn
There are no heroes...in life, the monsters win.
George R.R. Martin
I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.
Edna O'Brien
Her tiny and organized handwriting reminded me of the tidiness of her desk, as if she'd wanted to find in words the peace and safety that life hadn't wanted to grant her.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If you are possessed by an idea you find it expressed everywhere you even smell it.
Thomas Mann
Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
W Somerset Maugham
I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime.
Shirley Jackson
Too many times I'd left him reaching for me, from a babysitter's arms. "Am I still a mother?" I asked myself... What parts of the day could I cut out and still give him enough? Paul never asked himself that. He thought he was a great dad.
Mona Simpson
I can no longer cry. I groan a few times. Through the slits that are my eyes, I stare at my shoes, at the gray swirls of the concrete floor, at the bright orange lid of my syringe. And I realize—it’s a kind of horror—that this is my life.And I can’t stop. I just can’t stop. I can’t stop anymore.
Luke Davies
The Universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers."Stanley Kunitz
Shirley A. Moore
Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.
Benjamin Disraeli
Terrible times breed terrible things, my lord.
George R.R. Martin
Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both.
George R.R. Martin
When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
Margaret Drabble
Before he sets out the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
George Santayana
Putting his head down on the dog's neck, he vowed to himself fervently that he would always have some money on hand, no matter what became of him, so that he would be able to protect all that was truly valuable from the practical people in the world.
Morley Callaghan
The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead
Warren Adler
Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
The luxury of relaxation ... is part of the healing process.
Shirley Corder
It was gentler here, softer, its seethe the quietest of whispers, as if, in deference to a drawing room, it had quite deliberately put on its 'manners'; it kept itself out of sight, obliterated itself, but distinctly with an air of saying, 'Ah, but just wait! Wait till we are alone together! Then I will begin to tell you something new! Something white! something cold! something sleepy! something of cease, and peace, and the long bright curve of space! Tell them to go away. Banish them. Refuse to speak. Leave them, go upstairs to your room, turn out the light and get into bed - I will go with you, I will be waiting for you, I will tell you a better story than Little Kay of the Skates, or The Snow Ghost - I will surround your bed, I will close the windows, pile a deep drift against the door, so that none will ever again be able to enter. Speak to them!...' It seemed as if the little hissing voice came from a slow white spiral of falling flakes in the corner by the front window - but he could not be sure.("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")
Conrad Aiken
Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.
Ben Hecht
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
Against a set of desolate scenery, amid spectral crags and livid mountains of ash, beneath the funereal daylight of slopes illuminated in blue, she personified the spirit of the witches' sabbat. Morbid and voluptuous, sometimes with extenuated grace and infinite lassitude, she seemed to carry the burden of a criminal beauty, a beauty charged with all the sins cf the multitude. She fell again and again upon her pliant legs, and as she outlined the symbolic gestures of her two beautiful dead arms she seemed to be towing them behind her. Then, the vertigo of the abyss took hold of her again, and like one possessed she stood on point, holding herself fully erect from top to toe, like a spike of flesh and shadows. Her arms, weighed down just a few moments earlier, became menacing, demoniac, and audacious. Twisting like a screw, she whirled around, like a winnowing-machine - no, like a great lily stirred by a storm-wind. Clownish and macabre, a nacreous gleam showed between her lips... oh, that cruel and sardonic smile, and the two deep pools of her terrible eyes!Ize Kranile!
Jean Lorrain
Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.
René Daumal
Something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
W Somerset Maugham
I wished it was raining," he said."I don't need the rain," I said. "I need you.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Dorothy scratched her dark head, yawning wide, and white feathers floated out of her hair.
Laurie Lee
We both liked children; we just didn't want any ourselves. There were children everywhere, and we saw no reason to start our own brand. Young couples plunge into parenthood and about half the time they end up with some ghastly problem on their hands. We thought we'd leave that to others.
Thomas McGuane
I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking." She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried,” she said, “was because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all.
Shirley Jackson
She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it.
Ayn Rand
I’m not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it’s not really pain.
Ayn Rand
Ghosts!—They exist, they exist! Dead things playing at being alive.
Arthur Schnitzler
We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.
John D. MacDonald
Whom, then, to love? Whom to believe?Who is the only one that won't betray us?Who measures all deeds, all speechesobligingly by our own foot rule?Who does not sow slander about us?Who coddles us with care?To whom our vice is not so bad?Who never bores us?Unlike a futile phantom-seekerwho wastes effort in vain-love your own self,my honorworthy reader.A worthy object! Nothingmore amiable surely exists.
Alexander Pushkin
Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse.
Jasper Fforde
A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor.
George R.R. Martin
There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.
Arnold Bennett
I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds.
Ben Lerner
We're children. We're supposed to be childish.
George R.R. Martin
There’s no question that Laura – in more than one way, for many reasons – danced with the devil and paid a terrible price.
Mark Frost
Sitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to shape a mustache of blond fuzz, and when it was all over he looked the same as before, but the laborious process gave Amaranta the feeling that she had begun to grow old at that moment.
Gabriel García Márquez
Remember when I moved in you and the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was, "Hallelujah.
Leonard Cohen
Hair of the dog and to keep me company I made a drink.
James Kirkwood Jr.
Thoughts are meant to be words and words are meant to be written and what is written becomes a figment of the literature
Shilpa Sandesh
Well, you finally got me," Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.
John Irving
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.
George Santayana
Always tell what you feel. Do what you think...
Gabriel García Márquez
At times things doesn't happen our way. Let it happen the way our life want or god has decided. May be yet to come is the best to come.
shivangi lavaniya
On armageddon day,' Sandy said, 'both armies will think they fight for good. And both of them will be wrong.
George R.R. Martin
You can never know enough about your characters
W Somerset Maugham
Fabre looked up, his mobile face composed. "Good-bye," he said. "Georges-Jacques--study law. Law is a weapon.
Hilary Mantel
Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?
William Makepeace Thackeray
He who has lived and thought can neverHelp in his soul despising men,He who has felt will be foreverHaunted by days he can’t regain.For him there are no more enchantments,Him does the serpent of remembrance,Him does repentance always gnaw.All this will frequently affordA great delight to conversations.
Alexander Pushkin
Caricature is rough truth.
George Meredith
Self-sufficiency is the enemy of salvation. If you are self-sufficient, you have no need of God. If you have no need of God, you do not seek Him. If you do not seek Him, you will not find Him.
William Nicholson
I said, 'If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn't we meet them a long time ago?
Guy de Maupassant
The idiotic industry of an ant building his hill in the path of a glacier, and imagining that he is free.
John Clellon Holmes
Oh. My. God.’ she said, pointing out of the window. ‘Do you know what that is?’I nodded and said, ‘I think I may have seen it before.’‘That,’ said Florida, ‘is the Moonyouidiot.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
Claudius, you're luckier than you realize. Guard your appointment jealously. Don't let anyone usurp it.""What do you mean, girl?""I mean that people don't kill their butts. They are cruel to them, they frighten them, they rob them, but they don't kill them.
Robert Graves