Quotes by Novelists - Page 91

She was like a queen who beholds the virgin soil of her kingdom invaded and wasted by a traitor.Any other thing she would have pardoned: infidelity, indifference, cruelty, any sins of manhood's caprice or passion, but who should pardon this? The sin was not alone against herself; it was against every law of decency and truth that ever she had been taught to hold sacred; it was against all those great dead, who lay with the cross on their breasts and their swords by their side, from whom she had received and treasured the traditions of honor and purity of race.It was those dead knights whom he had smote upon the mouth and mocked, crying to them: 'Lo! your place is mine; my sons will reign in your stead. I have tainted your race forever; for every my blood flows with yours!'The greatness of a race is a thing far higher than mere pride. Its instincts are noble and supreme. Its obligations are no less than its privileges; it is a great light which streams backward through the darkness of the ages, and if by that light you guide not your footsteps, then are you thrice accursed, holding as you do that lamp of honor in your hands.So she had always thought, and now he had dashed the lamp in the dust.--"Wanda
Ouida
He saw the article...which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public—an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary.
Ayn Rand
All this time I had been trying to figure out the secrets of theuniverse, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart. All of the answers had always been soclose and yet I had always fought them without even knowing it. From the minute I’d met Dante, Ihad fallen in love with him. I just didn’t let myself know it, think it, feel it. My father was right.And it was true what my mother said. We all fight our own private wars.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
life is too short to despise people who simply can't help what they've done.
John Grisham
Necessity is often the spur to genius.
Honoré de Balzac
All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
[a]nd the Pig Man came in from Waitomo and swore that if Louisa didn't marry him he'd damn well vote Labour at the next ele
Ruth Park
The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it.
Ayn Rand
A man who hates music can't be trusted.
George R.R. Martin
But democrats are seldom welcome on planets run by totalitarian governments, and scarcely more welcome on planets where anarchy prevails--this is due to the very nature of democracy, the only practical compromise between totalitarianism and anarchy.
Christopher Stasheff
... People were never quite what you thought they were.
William Golding
We stand at an immense fork in the raod. One way is the path of generosity, dignity and a respect for other races and customs; the other leads most certainly to greed, suspicion, hatered and the old, bloody course of violence and waste - and now, God help us, to the very destruction of all the struggles and triumphs of the human race on this earth. My old friends and fellow townsmen: which will it be?
Anton Myrer
All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness but with energy and above all with illusions I pulled through them all.
Honoré de Balzac
The world the Citadel is building has no place in it for sorcery or prophecy or glass candles, much less for dragons.
George R.R. Martin
...he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.
Richard Russo
His heart expanded until he was nothing but a heart. A giant pounding heart on two shaking legs walking over to her.
Suanne Laqueur
Nothing happens unless first a dream.
Carl Sandburg
Curiosity is my great vice. I fear you have seen through to the heart of me, and now seek to exploit my weakness
George R.R. Martin
The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them.
W Somerset Maugham
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-A sunny day with the leaves just turning,The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you playYour first game of fotball, then, like a satelliteWrenched from its orbit, go drifting awayBehind a scatter of boys. I can seeYou walking away from me towards the schoolwith the pathos of a half-fledged thing set freeInto a wilderness, the gait of oneWho finds no path where the path should be.That hesitant figure, eddying awayLike a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,Has something I never quite grasp to conveyAbout nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorchingOrdeals which fire one's irresolute clay.I had worse partings, but none that soGnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughlySaying what God alone could perfectly show-How selfhood begins with a walking away,And love proved in the letting go.
Cecil Day-Lewis
That fighting of a battle without belief is, I think, the sorriest task which ever falls to the lot of any man.
Anthony Trollope
I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.
Shirley Jackson
Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are a malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth.
José Saramago
I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don't find out the answer as to why we were ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he'll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won't be anything at all.'But that's just it,' I said, 'we don't make any discovery at that moment! We merely stop! We pass into nonexistence without ever knowing a thing.' I saw the universe, a vision of the sun, the planets, the stars, black night going on forever. And I began to laugh.'Do you realize that! We'll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it's over!' I shouted at Nicolas, who was sitting back on the bed, nodding and drinking his wine out of a flagon. 'We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witness to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!
Anne Rice
Show me slowly what I onlyknow the limits ofDance me to the end of love
Leonard Cohen
People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.
Langston Hughes
Blessed is the covenant of love, the covenant of mercy, useless light behind the terror, deathless song in the house of night.
Leonard Cohen
Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.
Charles Kingsley
Bowden Cable is the sort of honest and dependable operative that is the backbone of SpecOps. They never win commendations or medalsand the public has no knowledge of them at all. They are all worth ten of people like me.
Jasper Fforde
There's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at last, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.
Sue Monk Kidd
Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.
Rémy de Gourmont
All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.
Joseph Conrad
When mental [illness] increases until it reaches the danger point, do not exhaust yourself by efforts to trace back to original causes. Better accept them as inevitable and save your strength to fight against the effects.
George Sand
Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
John Fowles
He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
Gustave Flaubert
Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.
José Saramago
He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.
Thomas Mann
It is difficult to call myself a writer, even when I stand at a podium to receive a prize, I feel uncomfortable calling myself a writer—I am merely a word criminal.
Murong Xuecun
Sion calls Anne an eel, he calls her a slippery dipper from the slime, and he remembers what the cardinal had called her: my serpentine enemy. Sion says, she goes to it with her brother; he says, what, her brother George? ‘Any brother she's got. Those kind keep it in the family. They do filthy French tricks, like –’‘Can you keep your voice down?’ He looks around, as if spies might be swimming by the boat.‘– and that's how she trusts herself she don't give in to Henry, because if she lets him do it and she gets a boy he's, thanks very much, now clear off, girl – so she's oh, Your Highness, I never could allow – because she knows that very night her brother's inside her, licking her up to the lungs, and then he's, excuse me, sister, what shall I do with this big package – she says, oh,don't distress yourself, my lord brother, shove it up the back entry, it'll come to no harm there.
Hilary Mantel
She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above.
George R.R. Martin
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
George Santayana
There are times where excessive innocence seems so monstrous that it becomes hateful.
Gaston Leroux
Question and AnswerDurban, Birmingham,Cape Town, Alabama,Johannesburg, Watts,The earth aroundStruggling, fighting,Dying--for what?A world to gain.Groping, hoping,Waiting--for what?A world to gain.Dreams kicked asunder,Why not go under?There's a world to gain.But suppose I don't want it,Why take it?To remake it.
Langston Hughes
You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.
Richard Price
The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.
Henry Green
With lack of sleep and too much understanding I grow a little crazy, I think, like all men at sea who live too close to each other and too close thereby to all that is monstrous under the sun and moon.
William Golding
We someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only the one or two fish that he needs to feed himself and puts the rest in the water, thinking that their lives will go back to normal. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.
Yaa Gyasi
the condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.
Thornton Wilder
But are you not fond of me?" Paris looked up, his eyes full of reproach."Fond of you? Myrina you are my queen. I want you more than I want life itself.
Anne Fortier
Imagine. Freedom. Always.
Edward Rutherfurd
I speak of new cities and new peopleI tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,a sun dropped in the west.I tell you there is nothing in the worldonly an ocean of tomorrows.a sky of tomorrows.I am a brother of the cornhuskers who sayat sundown:Tomorrow is a day.”- Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers
Carl Sandburg
Of course I need you. I go insane when I see you. You can do almost anything you wish with me. Is that what you want to hear? Almost, Dominique. And the things you couldn't make me do — you could put me through hell if you demanded them and I had to refuse you, as I would. Through utter hell, Dominique. Does that please you? Why do you want to know whether you own me? It's so simple. Of course you do. All of me that can be owned. You'll never demand anything else. But you want to know whether you could make me suffer. You could. What of it?" The words did not sound like surrender, because they were not torn out of him, but admitted simply and willingly. She felt no thrill of conquest; she felt herself owned more than ever, by a man who could say these things, know them to be true, and still remain controlled and controlling — as she wanted him to remain.
Ayn Rand
Hélène, her eyes once more raised and remote, was deep in a dream. She was Lady Rowena, she was in love, with the deep peaceful passion of a noble soul. This spring morning, the loveliness of the great city, the first wallflowers scenting her lap, had little by little melted her heart.
Émile Zola
This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
In the distance,far over there, only the eyes can travel when the body is weary.
Yvette Christiansë
Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?
Joseph Conrad
You are too kind, and I am unused to it. For your own sake, do not stroke my misery. It knows not how to respond, but with a vicious bite.
Anne Fortier
The sky was like ebony and the only illumination was the harsh white light of the central streetlamp, which cast shadows so hard it seemed you might cut yourself on them.
Jasper Fforde
... time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop, and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.
José Saramago
Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón