Quotes by Novelists - Page 82

Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
George Santayana
The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.
Benjamin Disraeli
On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.
Tim O'Brien
Life was like a jigsaw, but if you tried to fit the pieces together yourself, you generally got them wrong. Pierre had money; she needed money. Pierre was lovable and loved her; she would marry him. She had thought that was the pattern the pieces made. But it had been like trying to force two pieces together that didn't fit, and then, suddenly, the jigsaw had been done, in quite a different way, by other hands.
Monica Dickens
Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont
Ayn Rand
These are the sports, the offthrows, of the universe instead of the species; these are the weird children of the lust of the spheres.
Charles G. Finney
He imagined that he was looking for her and couldn't find her anywhere, that the two of them were lost on a vast ship, sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another, the woman is sleeping only a few yards away from him and he cannot reach her, yet it's so very easy to go from port to starboard.
José Saramago
Will you, then, never grow weary of being unjust?
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Facing it-always facing it-that's the way to get through. Face it!
Joseph Conrad
Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving
It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life — its facility, its use.
William H. Gass
Il arrive un âge où ils ne sont plus séduisants, ni «en forme», comme on dit. Ils ne peuvent plus boire et ils pensent encore aux femmes; seulement ils sont obligés de les payer, d'accepter des quantités de petites compromissions pour échapper à leur solitude. Ils sont bernés, malheureux. C'est ce moment qu'ils choisissent pour devenir sentimentaux et exigeants… J'en ai vu beaucoup devenir ainsi des sortes d'épaves. "A time comes when they are no longer attractive or in good form. They can't drink any more, and they still hanker after women, only then they have to pay and make compromises in order to escape from their loneliness: they have become just figures of fun. They grow sentimental and hard to please. I haveseen many who have gone the same way.
Françoise Sagan
I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.
Langston Hughes
The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.
Gabriel García Márquez
Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.
Hilary Mantel
You don't know what it means to live the life that you could have lived, if an event over which you have no control, an unforeseeable circumstance, had not distracted and diverted you, and at times crushed you, as has happened to me.
Luigi Pirandello
The condition of women in a nation is the real measure of its progress.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
A wise man once told me that mystery is the most essential ingredient of life, for the following reason: mystery creates wonder, which leads to curiosity, which in turn provides the ground for our desire to understand who and what we truly are.
Mark Frost
So since I'm still here livin',I guess I will live on.I could've died for love--But for livin' I was born.
Langston Hughes
And it’s great to have all these readers and fans who, for the most part, are very nice people, saying they love the books and the TV show. But there are so many of them and it just doesn’t end. Oh, and ‘selfies’! If I could clap my hands and burn out every camera phone in the world, I swear I’d do it!
George R.R. Martin
As she stared at them, Waringa noted that their skins were indeed red, like that of pigs or like the skin of a black person who has been scalded with boiling water or who has burned himself with acid creams. Even the hair in their arms and necks stood out stiff and straight like the bristle of an aging hog.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
She made a visual inventory of the disaster and confirmed that the girl was curled up like a snail, her head hidden between her arms: terrified but intact. "My God!" Rosa Cabarcas exclaimed. "What I wouldn’t have given for a love like this!
Gabriel García Márquez
It is not perhaps a question of truthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when the ingenuously write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god reading--perhaps--over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman, to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even higher genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous works of men themselves, the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them.
Rémy de Gourmont
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
David Markson
Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.
José Saramago
How can we know the dancer from the dance? Did Yeats create his poems, or did his poetry make him a poet? How does one separate the creator from hiscreation? They create each other. On a mutual plane of reference, one has no existence without the other.
Indu Muralidharan
Can there be anything more sad than a girl dying on the day of her first communion, in her new dress. A little bride of death...
Georges Rodenbach
Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.
Guy de Maupassant
I know it does not matter that I do not understand.
Brendan Kennelly
To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind. But women who are too vain and act pretentiously, to the extent that they make others feel uncomfortable, will themselves become the object of attention; and once that happens, people will find fault with whatever they say or do; whether it be how they enter a room, how they sit down, how they stand up or how they take their leave. Those who end up contradicting themselves and those who disparage their companions are also carefully watched and listened to all the more. As long as you are free from such faults, people will surely refrain from listening to tittle-tattle and will want to show you sympathy, if only for the sake of politeness. I am of the opinion that when you intentionally cause hurt to another, or indeed if you do ill through mere thoughtless behavior, you fully deserve to be censured in public. Some people are so good-natured that they can still care for those who despise them, but I myself find it very difficult. Did the Buddha himself in all his compassion ever preach that one should simply ignore those who slander the Three Treasures? How in this sullied world of ours can those who are hard done by be expected to reciprocate in kind?
Murasaki Shikibu
Only Marxists," Dr. Iggy concluded, opening the door to usher Joe into the chapel room, "stillbelieve in an objective history. Marxists and a few disciples of Ayn Rand.
Robert Shea
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
Gustave Flaubert
As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that…
John Burnside
When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head.
Thomas Love Peacock
All men are fools, if truth be told, but the ones in motley are more amusing than ones with crowns.
George R.R. Martin
When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, "weaving fearful vision" ... A frustrated poet in every man. Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with one's great work on "Secret Knowledge," then one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains the deficiency.
Malcolm Lowry
Emergencies send sparks to the darkest corner of us. They wake up our hormones and neurotransmitters, they remove the rust from our body and mind, and they show us we can still handle crisis with poise. Emergencies push us to our limits. At those limits, the best inside us comes out. The eyes of our mind open, exceptional vision occurs to us, and we have a chance to become extraordinary.
Indrajit Garai
He always smiles, even when contemplating nothing good.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
I dislike this whole business of experimentation on animals, unless there's some very good and altogether exceptional reason to this very case. The thing that gets me is that it's not possible for the animals to understand why they are being called upon to suffer. They don't suffer for their own good or benefit at all, and I often wonder how far it's for anyone's. They're given no choice, and there is no central authority responsible for deciding whether what's done is morally justifiable. These experiment animals are just sentient objects; they're useful because they are able to react; sometimes precisely because they're able to feel fear and pain. And they're used as if they were electric light bulbs or boots. What it comes to is that whereas there used to be human and animal slaves, now there are just animal slaves. They have no legal rights or choices in the matter.
Richard Adams
It's something you don't see until it's gone-the shapes and things have and the ways in which the people around you mould the shapes.
Amitav Ghosh
The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?
Wilkie Collins
If only my genitals didn't floatWhen I relaxed in the bathAnd we both looked down and we both agreedIt's stupid to be a man
Leonard Cohen
Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect
George Sand
Nothing in the world delights a truly religious people so much as consigning them to eternal damnation.
James Hogg
Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can’t stiffen up enough to create them.
Gustave Flaubert
You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you.
Niall Williams
Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.
Anne Rice
That was desire messing with physics: putting its finger on the record and then slowing it down, making sure you heard every word spoken, and memorized it.
Heather O'Neill
I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.
William Morris
That's one way we differ, Jaime and I. He's taller as well, you may have noticed.
George R.R. Martin
The fact that none of these civic worriers had ever heard of such a case was unimportant, because they all had heard of somebody who had heard of it!
Sinclair Lewis
Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.
Rémy de Gourmont
Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life. 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-defence, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. The second creation, the birth of the organic out of the inorganic, was only another fatal stage in the progress of the corporeal toward consciousness, just as disease in the organism was an intoxication, a heightening and unlicensed accentuation of its physical state; and life, life was nothing but the next step on the reckless path of the spirit dishonored; nothing but the automatic blush of matter roused to sensation and become receptive for that which awaked it.
Thomas Mann
The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?
John Hersey
Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought--and more reading.
Jasper Fforde
Sometimes what we think is good for others... might be destructive for them... you never know
shivangi lavaniya
Every man has a right to kill himself.
James Jones
Lying there in the darkness, he knew he was an outcast. " 'Cos I had some sense.
William Golding
A story that must be told never forgives silence.
Okey Ndibe