Quotes by Novelists - Page 9

Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
Gustave Flaubert
As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.
Gustave Flaubert
In the twentieth century the women who wanted to be on their own were some of the best, the honest ones, those who instinctively rejected the trash. But here came a tragical dilemma. If they accepted Business and served it, they served the very thing from which they fled, and at best became imitation men. If they rejected Business and lived on allowances or incomes, they were in the anomalous position of hunting with the industrial hounds and running with the agricultural hare. An instinctive sense of this made many of them turn "artist." And so Europe was cluttered up with incompetent women "artists" -- not that a woman is incapable of being an artist, but because the assumed role provided an escape. Either situation was impossible, and the solution is not yet found.
Richard Aldington
He asked her, 'Why do you feel sorry for me, Old Woman?'The Old Woman stood beside him and looked out the window at the Garden, so beautiful, flowering and everywhere illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and said, 'I feel sorry for you, dear Youth, because I know where you are gazing and what you are waiting for. I feel sorry for you and your mother.'Perhaps because of these words, or perhaps because of something else, there was a change in the Youth's mood. The Garden, flowering behind the high fence below his window, and exuding a wonderful fragrance, suddenly seemed somehow strange to him; and an ominous sensation, a sudden fear, gripped his heart with a violent palpitation, like heady and languid fragrances rising from brilliant flowers.'What is happening?' he wondered in confusion.("The Poison Garden")
Valery Bryusov
It seems an insult to the night to speak of purpose and intent, when this common moment is so brimming full of blessed design tranquility. All things follow their course.
Anne Rice
Here I am going to say something which may come as a bit of a shock. God doesn't necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love. Able to be loved by Him. We don't start off being all that lovable, if we're honest. What makes people hard to love? Isn't it what is commonly called selfishness? Selfish people are hard to love because so little love comes out of them.
William Nicholson
The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think.
Wallace Stegner
I was getting an A for work. But not for talent. The story of my life.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.
José Saramago
I'm one of the few persons I ever met who are able to learn from experience.
W Somerset Maugham
What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness ofnormality that is just a myth.
Anne Rice
And all at once he saw before him a precipice, as it were without bottom. He was a patrician, a military tribune, a powerful man; but above every power of that world to which he belonged was a madman whose will and malignity it was impossible to foresee. Only such people as the Christians might cease to reckon with Nero or fear him, people for whom this whole world, with its separations and sufferings, was as nothing; people for whom death itself was as nothing. All others had to tremble before him. The terrors of the time in which they lived showed themselves to Vinicius in all their monstrous extent...Vinicius felt, for the first time in life, that either the world must change and be transformed, or life would become impossible altogether. He understood also this, which a moment before had been dark to him, that in such times only Christians could be happy.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
There is such a shelter in each other.
Nick Laird
All the little birdies had flown out of this man's tree.
Sue Grafton
She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they were two; they might need you more at twenty, she thought. What do you really need when you're two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.
John Irving
Yes you may come." Paris held up a hand to delay Myrina's raptures. "But this time you will not be wearing my crown. You will be my slave, and believe me I shall enjoy ordering you around.
Anne Fortier
If any has a stone to throw It is not I ever or now.
Elinor Wylie
Something came out from my heart into my throat and then into my eyes.
Jean Rhys
It’s not an easy time for any parent, this moment when the realization dawns that you’ve given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name.
Richard Russo
[Being in love] is something like poetry. Certainly you can analyze it and expound its various senses and intentions but there is always something left over mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.
Muriel Spark
You know the facts about me about which even i am unknown...
shivangi lavaniya
Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper.
John Fowles
It is simple. Men lose their birthrights for a mess of pottage only if they stop using the gifts given them by God for their betterment. By prayer. That is the first and greatest gift. use the gift of prayer. Ask for strength of mind, and a clear vision. Then sense. Use your sense. Not all of us are born for greatness, but all of us have sense. Make use of it. Think. Think long and well. By prayer and good thought you will conquer all enemies....Behold, the night is coming. Prepare, for the time is at hand.
Richard Llewellyn
Truth and falsehood pass through the same lips and leave no mark, the devil does not cease to be the devil just because he may have spoken the truth.
José Saramago
To have luck and fail to act on it is tantamount to not having luck at all. In fact, it was worse. Barnes thought back to his self-help manuals. They all proclaimed with compelling force the necessity of recognizing opportunity then seizing it when it stuck.
Joseph G. Peterson
I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.
Shirley Jackson
More than that, in the five hundred years of European OCCUPATION, Native cultures have already driven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient.
Thomas King
The best fiction is true.
Kinky Friedman
A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.
John Fowles
Mary, it must be remembered, was very nearly of the same age as Frank; but, as I and others have so often said before, 'Women grow on the sunny side of the wall.
Anthony Trollope
And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous.
George R.R. Martin
YOUNG WOMAN: Time is altered, the years to came are alteredYou know where you will find meI, fear, I, deathI, the memory beyond reachI, the recollection of the tenderness of your handsI, the sadness of our broken lifeI will defeat "it's not my concern" with my anguish
Griselda Gambaro
I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.
Shirley Jackson
She had never felt so light of heart and it seemed to her as though her body were a shell that lay at her feet and she pure spirit. Here was Beauty.
m. somerset maugham
When indeed you positively press your face, so to speak, against the crystalline window of your eyes, your mind is apt to become a perfect vacuum.("Out Of The Deep")
Walter de la Mare
I saw my father as a man, and not, as a man who was my father.
Richard Llewellyn
I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
John Fowles
To tell the truth, girls are no longer the way they used to be. They play gangsters, nowadays, just like boys. They organize rackets. They plan holdups and practice karate. They will rape defenseless adolescents. They wear pants... Life has become impossible.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
I have outlasted all desire,My dreams and I have grown apart;My grief alone is left entire,The gleamings of an empty heart.The storms of ruthless dispensationHave struck my flowery garland numb,I live in lonely desolationAnd wonder when my end will come.Thus on a naked tree-limb, blastedBy tardy winter's whistling chill,A single leaf which has outlastedIts season will be trembling still.
Alexander Pushkin
It seems we need someone to know us as we are--with all we have done--and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please. ...for...others it seems there must be a person to redeem us to ourselves. It isn't enough, apparently, to know oneself. To forgive oneself in secret.
Sue Miller
The man who suspects his own tediousness has yet to be born.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.
Thornton Wilder
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
Gustave Flaubert
The fate of animals is of far greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous.
Émile Zola
4:15. Not 4 not 4:30 but 4:15. She thought to intimidate me with the use of quarter hours.
Muriel Spark
Art cannot save anybody from anything.
Gilbert Sorrentino
How do they find out with the experiments?''...one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one that works.''But isn't that unkind to the animal?''Well, I suppose it is...but I mean, there isn't a dad anywhere who would hesitate, is there, if he knew it was going to make [his child] better? It's changed the whole world during the last hundred years, and that's no exaggeration.
Richard Adams
My animal howlsMy angel's upsetBut I'm not allowedA trace of regret
Leonard Cohen
Ralph chose the firm strip as a path because he needed to think, and only here could he allow his feet to move without having to watch them. Suddenly, pacing by the water, he was overcome with astonishment. He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
William Golding
why our story have no ending?
Shivi
Pleasured equallyIn seeking as in finding,Each detail minding,Old Walt went seekingAnd finding.
Langston Hughes
Beware of advice—even this.
Carl Sandburg
Sellswords put gold before honor.
George R.R. Martin
This is a woman whose belly is filled with pride. She has been eating nothing but her own ambition for nearly thirty years.
Philippa Gregory
His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death.
Edward St. Aubyn
It's easy to make money, a lot tougher to make a difference
Shilpa Menon
Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitterness.
Gustave Flaubert
The difficulty of life is in the choice.
George Moore
Be kind. Always if you have a choice, be kind.
Anne Rice