Quotes by Novelists - Page 95

Merciful God!" sighed the General. "We've arrived." And it was true. For there was the sea, and on the other side of the sea was the world.
Gabriel García Márquez
Man's the bad child of the universe.
James Oppenheim
He is ugly and sad... but he is all love.
Gabriel García Márquez
You know you're about as forthcoming as a mime.
Shirley Jump
Erik: Are you very tired?Christine: Oh, tonight I gave you my soul, and I am dead.Erik: Your soul is a beautiful thing, child. No emperor received so fair a gift. The angels wept to-night.
Gaston Leroux
PDR: Persons of Dubious Reality; refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real, from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Characters from cautionary tales are particularly mindless; they do what they do because it's what they've always done.And it's our job to stop them.
Jasper Fforde
We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
Ayn Rand
...that this monster, who is only one in form, has a heart so humane that he should not be persecuted for a deformity which he refrains from rendering more hideous by his actions...
Gabrielle Suzanne Barbot De Villeneuve
When one woman strikes at the heart of another, she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
No place in England where everyone can go is considered respectable.
George Moore
Brick and blood built Astapor, and brick and blood her people.
George R.R. Martin
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate and she is fate.
Thomas Mann
Looking at a king's mouth, ' said an old man, 'one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast.
Chinua Achebe
Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real.
John Fowles
Look back, and smile on perils past!
Walter Scott
It never pays to deal with the flyweights of the world. They take far too much pleasure in thwarting you at every turn.
Sue Grafton
A young woman stood before the railing, speaking to the reception clerk. Her slender body seemed out of all scale in relation to a normal human body; its lines were so long, so fragile, so exaggerated that she looked like a stylized drawing of a woman and made the correct proportions of a normal being appear heavy and awkward beside her. She wore a plain gray suit; the contrast between its tailored severity and her appearance was deliberately exorbitant—and strangely elegant.She let the finger tips of one hand rest on the railing, a narrow hand ending the straight imperious line of her arm. She had gray eyes that were not ovals, but two long, rectangular cuts edged by parallel lines of lashes; she had an air of cold serenity and an exquisitely vicious mouth. Her face, her pale gold hair, her suit seemed to have no color, but only a hint, just on the verge of the reality of color, making the full reality seem vulgar. Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty.
Ayn Rand
I learn my life lessons from time rather than lesser mortals.
Shivam Chaudhary
What did being connected to the world get you? It got you sadder. Look, the world is not sane. If you stay connected to an insane world, well, you just go crazy. This is not a complicated theory. It's just simple logic.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.--"Wanda
Ouida
I had no illusions about you,' he said. 'I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty-headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved you. I knew that you were second-rate. But I loved you. It's comic when I think how hard I tried to be amused by the things that amused you and how anxious I was to hide from you that I wasn't ignorant and vulgar and scandal-mongering and stupid. I knew how frightened you were of intelligence and I did everything I could to make you think me as big a fool as the rest of the men you knew. I knew that you'd only married me for convenience. I loved you so much, I didn't care. Most people, as far as I can see, when they're in love with someone and the love isn't returned feel that they have a grievance. They grow angry and bitter. I wasn't like that. I never expected you to love me, I didn't see any reason that you should. I never thought myself very lovable. I was thankful to be allowed to love you and I was enraptured when now and then I thought you were pleased with me or when I noticed in your eyes a gleam of good-humored affection. I tried not to bore you with my love; I knew I couldn't afford to do that and I was always on the lookout for the first sign that you were impatient with my affection. What most husbands expect as a right I was prepared to receive as a favor.
W Somerset Maugham
I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade.
Jasper Fforde
We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Ireland is a fatal disease fatal to Englishmen and doubly fatal to Irishmen.
George Moore
I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.
Ayn Rand
For life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don't love.
Anne Garréta
We are like the herb which flourisheth most when trampled upon
Walter Scott
The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.
Herman Wouk
Insecure people have a special sensitivity for anything that finally confirms their own low opinion of themselves.
Sue Grafton
I had to admit that I had a strong tendency to date jokers. I couldn’t say no to them. I would sit across from someone I was dating and try to imagine who in the entire world would date this nimrod other than me. But I always had to have a boyfriend. They distracted me from being sad. They baffled me with their stupidity. I refused to believe that finding love was difficult.
Heather O'Neill
how often fears come to sour our life and prove, in the end, to have no foundation, no reason to exist
José Saramago
You can get all A's and still flunk life.
Walker Percy
I am alive, and drunk on sunlight.
George R.R. Martin
It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
Russell Banks
You don’t have to speak at all—I know what you’d say…- Laura
Wilkie Collins
One voyage to the East and a man could live as rich as a lord until the end of his days. When he'd been younger, Davos had dreamed of making such voyages himself. But the years went dancing by like moths around a flame, and somehow the time had never been quite right.
George R.R. Martin
Your body's dying...pay no attention
Anne Rice
Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth...
Keri Hulme
Small hopes can grow surprising fruit.
Robert Jordan
No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition.
Benjamin Disraeli
Un paraíso conseguido sin esfuerzo no entusiasma al creyente.
Pío Baroja
Anyone could see that this woman is living a nightmare. Except that she goes through her daily life wide awake, knowing that she could make a mistake at any moment.
Núria Añó
She hadn’t planned any of this, but her thoughts ran away with her, and she hated how pathetic she must sound. Poor little human needed the big bad angel to rescue her. Yuck.
India Drummond
The gift blesses the giver.
Hilary Mantel
As if one's capacity for pain had anything to do with life's apportionment of agonies, Mr. Kimmelbrod thought. Such idiocy.
Ayelet Waldman
And may my bronze name / touch always her thousand fingers / grow brighter with her weeping / until I am fixed like a galaxy / and memorized / in her secret and fragile skies.
Leonard Cohen
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:Out of a misty dreamOur path emerges for awhile, then closesWithin a dream.
Ernest Dowson
The man is as useless as nipples on a breastplate.
George R.R. Martin
Neil said to me once that in times of desperation, you have to force yourself to make a decision.It's your choice, he said. Us or them. So choose.
Shirley Marr
Only on the Internet can a person be lonely and popular at the same time.
Allison Burnett
Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.
Ayn Rand
Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that dripsfrom my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and itthrobs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
It’s easier to donate a few thousands to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence—such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.
Ayn Rand
...Opinion without a rational process.
Ayn Rand
...the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.""...a ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.
George R.R. Martin
Alas, my being the James Bond of vampires isn't the whole issue. Vanity must wait.
Anne Rice
In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
Joseph Conrad
Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.
Carlos Fuentes
Friends are the family we choose for ourselves.
Edna Buchanan
You can’t expect to go both ways when you’re driving on a one-way street.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz