Quotes by Novelists - Page 85

We live as we dream--alone....
Joseph Conrad
Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.
Anne Rice
İnsanlık öldü belki de hiç yaşamamıştı..!!Humanity was dead.Maybe never live too..!!
Oğuz Atay
Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fin
Gustave Flaubert
His face frankly displays his suffering, expressing it with a truly royal simplicity. At such moments even the very best people are apt to give themselves away with the kind of look which says to you more or less directly: 'You see how I'm sticking it out; don't praise me, it's my nature; thanks all the same.' But the Curé de Torcy looks straight at you, guilelessly. His eyes beg your compassion and sympathy. But with what nobility they beg! A king might beg in just that way.
Georges Bernanos
Let the mind contemplate, let the pen scribble, the oeuvre would be eccentric, peculiar to a reader's eye.
Shilpa Sandesh
The act was an exorcism of relief for Florentino Ariza, for when he put the violin back into its case and walked down the dead streets without looking back, he no longer felt that he was leaving the next morning but that he had gone away many years before with the irrevocable determination never to return.
Gabriel García Márquez
There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.
David James Duncan
We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed.
William Kent Krueger
As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.
Gabriel García Márquez
Half asleep, he wondered whether that might not have been his happiest day ever, the last, perfect day swelling with the immensity of his secret intent, secret creation—the day before everything changed—the day before he realized, for the first time, yet with absolute finality, just how small his private immensity really was when measured against that other vast, dark, impersonal immensity, call it God, or history, or simply life.
Olga Grushin
To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
Wallace Stegner
There is no such thing as "the right to enslave".A nation can do it , just as a man can become a criminal - but neither can do it by right. It doesn't matter in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force (like soviet Russia), or by vote (like Nazi Germany).
Ayn Rand
This showed once again that everyone had something different to lose in this battle. Some were concerned for their lives, and some for those they cared most about: rays, sea horses, even the chickens that ran free in the streets of the city because they couldn't all be caught in time.
Kai Meyer
No, Sully'd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn't, any more than he'd blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn't pay to second-guess every one of life's decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older.
Richard Russo
Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.
Richard Russo
Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.
George Meredith
Why are we asked to make the most important decisions of our lives when we are so young, and so prone to mistakes?
Samuel Park
Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave.
Pico Iyer
Life is warmth and warmth is fire, and fire is God's and God's alone.
George R.R. Martin
Marian’s eyes absolutely blaze. To meet them is to have a shock of contact as if they were electrically charged. “Now you see? You wondered what was in whale’s milk. Don’t you know now? The same thing that’s in a mushroom spore so small you need a microscope to see it, or in gophers, or poison oak, or anything else we try to pave under or grub out, or poison. There isn’t good life and bad life, there’s only life. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born!
Wallace Stegner
Lady Selyse was as tall as her husband, thin of body and thin of face, with prominent ears, a sharp nose, and the faintest hint of a mustache on her upper lip. She plucked it daily and cursed it regularly, yet it never failed to return. Her eyes were pale, her mouth stern, her voice a whip. She cracked it now.
George R.R. Martin
A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
Hilary Mantel
Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
John Irving
Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Staring into someone’s eyes for a long time is psychic. At first it’s very strange and scary - scarier than the first time you have sex. Then you begin to relax, and the person you’re looking at may become very beautiful. As you look into their eyes, you may see them change sex or race. You can see the child in an old person and a young person may appear ancient. Just looking into someone’s eyes for a long time can be trippier than taking acid.
Steve Abbott
The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped,deserves to be whipped.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsomely indifferent.
John Berger
It is easy to be clever if you leave something important out.
Peter Redgrove
The essentials of poetry are rhythm dance and the human voice.
Earle Birney
England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.
Robert Graves
I feel that there has to be a purpose to what we do. If there was no hope at all, we should just sleep or drink and wait for death. But we don’t want to do that. And why? I think something tells us that we should struggle. We don’t really know why we should struggle, but we do, because we think it’s better than sitting down and waiting for calamity.
Chinua Achebe
I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
Joseph Conrad
Personally, I think, so what? Money's just a thing and things change. That's what I've found. One minute something's really there, right next to you, and you can cuddle up to it. The next it just melts away, like a Hershey's kiss.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.
George R.R. Martin
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.", Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)
John Irving
It is no wonder lesbians love women.
Gilbert Sorrentino
The ceremony was fast so we wouldn't be caught. When it was over, the men all whispered 'Mazel tov' and climbed back onto their shelves. I went up to the boy and pressed the wooden horse into his hands, the only present I could give him. The boy looked at me with big, round eyes. Had I ever been so young? 'We are alive,' I told him. 'We are alive, and that is all that matters. We cannot let them tear us from the pages of the world.'I said it as much for me as for him. I said it in memory of Uncle Moshe, and my mother and father, and my aunts and other uncles and cousins. The Nazis had put me in a gas chamber. I had thought I was dead, but I was alive. I was a new man that day, just like the bar mitzvah boy. I was a new man, and I was going to survive.
Alan Gratz
DEAR DI­ARYYou are greater than the BibleAnd the Con­fer­ence of the BirdsAnd the Up­an­ishadsAll put to­geth­erYou are more se­vereThan the Scrip­turesAnd Ham­mura­bi’s CodeMore dan­ger­ous than Luther’s pa­perNailed to the Cathe­dral doorYou are sweet­erThan the Song of SongsMight­ier by farThan the Epic of Gil­gameshAnd braverThan the Sagas of Ice­landI bow my head in grat­itudeTo the ones who give their livesTo keep the se­cretThe dai­ly se­cretUn­der lock and keyDear Di­aryI mean no dis­re­spectBut you are more sub­limeThan any Sa­cred TextSome­times just a listOf my eventsIs holi­er than the Bill of RightsAnd more in­tense
Leonard Cohen
Need is not transitive, one may need without oneself being needed.
Amitav Ghosh
Poverty has in its favour an exquisite sleep filled with beautiful dreams.
Honoré de Balzac
Strange clothes you wear, Child of the Dragon. Has the Wheel turned so far? Do the People of the Dragon return to the first Covenant? But you wear a sword. That is neither now nor then.
Robert Jordan
A rich man loves to work, a poor man loves to eat.
Dương Thu Hương
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
John Fowles
Every time a man smiles and much more when he laughs it adds something to his fragment of life.
Laurence Sterne
There is some delight in ale and wineAnd some in girls with ankles fineBut my delight, yes always mineIs to dance with Jak O’ the ShadowsWe will toss the dice however they fallAnd snuggle the girls be they short or tallThen follow Lord Mat whenever he callsTo dance with Jak O’ the Shadows.
Robert Jordan
Who can say for certain that he is sincere, who can say for certain that he believes? In the midst of of our deepest emotions we are acting a comedy with ourselves; within us one self is always mocking another self. - priscilla and emily lofte
George Moore
Her father had learned only one thing in prison. Not humility, nor patience, nor understanding...Marshall Kofer had learned to listen, at least to his daughter".
John Grisham
Who could have foretoldthe heart grows oldfrom touching others
Leonard Cohen
Here is a minute. It may be my love is dead, but here is a minute to kneel over the grave and pray by it.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.
Jean Toomer
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.
George Santayana
... freedom is the knowledge of necessity and there is no wealth but life. When you understand that you understand everything.
Olivia Manning
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Honoré de Balzac
Man is a coward in space, for he is by himself.
Richard Llewellyn
The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.
C.L.R. James
The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.
Sōseki Natsume
The books I would like to print are the books I love to read and keep.
William Morris
Intimacy makes you feel unique. Intimacy makes you feel as though you have been singled out, that someone in the world believes you have special qualities that nobody else has.
Heather O'Neill
The dead are mute, but the living still have voice with which to protest their innocence. Often their objections are noisy and pious, impossible to refute since the person who could condemn them has been silenced forever.
Sue Grafton