Quotes by Novelists - Page 96

I like Mr. Dickens’ books much better than yours, Papa. Said one of Thackeray’s daughters.
David Markson
Rand had changed a number of laws in Tear, especially those that weighed heavily on the poor, but he had been unable to change everything. He had not even known how to begin. Lews Therin began to maunder on about taxes and money creating jobs, but he might as well have been spilling out words at random for all the sense he made.
Robert Jordan
It has its dark splendor, to walk the nightmare terrain forever.
Anne Rice
Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.
George R.R. Martin
The storms come and go, the waves crash overhead, the big fish eat the little fish, and I keep on paddling. (Varys)
George R.R. Martin
Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.
Lawrence Durrell
They did not, however, infect the air as the Sudanese sun dried them up like mummies; all had the hue of gray parchment, and were so much alike that the bodies of the Europeans, Egyptians, and negroes could not be distinguished from each other.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.
W Somerset Maugham
Myslím, že na místa, kde se odvíjely rozhodující události našich životů, stojí za to občas zavítat, abychom zjistili: nemáme sami se sebou nic společného.
Imre Kertész
Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.
Ayn Rand
Vanity Fair--Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read--who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted him; and in Vanity Fair he had a higher place than the most brilliant genius or spotless virtue.
William Makepeace Thackeray
When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool, she will not love him again.
Philippa Gregory
You look at love, and especially woman, as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted-I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them-just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept.
Ayn Rand
I love metaphor the way some people love junk food. I think metaphorically, feel metaphorically, see metaphorically. And if anything in writing comes easily, comes unbidded, often unwanted, it is metaphor. Like follows as as night the day. Now most of these metaphors are bad and have to be thrown away. Who saves used Kleenex? I never have to say: "What shall I compare this to?" a summer's day? No. I have to beat the comparisons back into the holes they pour from. Some salt is savory. I live in a sea.
william gass
At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking!
Ayn Rand
The well of true wit is truth itself.
George Meredith
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
John Irving
She follows her nose and stands once more before the doors of a quintessential dilemma. Male or Female. Here is her paradox. A staccato voice seems to challenge her, berate her. Hombre or Mujer. Mann or Frau. Homme or Femme. Gentleman or Lady. Com on, decide. She knows them all. She is them all. Not fluid or all-encompassing, gathering the harvest of the reaping fields, but fractured and split and bleeding. Her inner core weeping out of itself. There is nothing for hermaphrodites. It's too confusing. The words rattle around in her earbones, androgynous and humming. How can she choose? She cannot choose. To choose is to sunder.
Mark O'Flynn
Do you know how long God took to destroy the Tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? Seven minutes. There’s more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City and Brooklyn and the Bronx? Seven seconds. Seven Seconds.
John dos Passos
If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? . . . Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability.
Ayn Rand
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
W Somerset Maugham
I am afraid of him now. The one I love most in the world.
Neil Jordan
The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who can app|y it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialtsts?
John Berger
The school is a mother
Edmondo de Amicis
Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Pausing on the threshold, he looked in, conscious not so much of the few familiar sticks of furniture - the trucklebed, the worn strip of Brussels carpet, the chipped blue-banded ewer and basin, the framed illuminated texts on the walls - as of a perfect hive of abhorrent memories.That high cupboard in the corner, from which certain bodiless shapes had been wont to issue and stoop at him cowering out of his dreams; the crab-patterned paper that came alive as you stared; the window cold with menacing stars; the mouseholes, the rusty grate - trumpet of every wind that blows - these objects at once lustily shouted at him in their own original tongues.("Out Of The Deep")
Walter de la Mare
A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all.
Georges Bernanos
Come on! Think of Miandad hitting that six off Sharma. If he could do that, you can do this.
Kamila Shamsie
Anyone who sang the praises of undying love in this day and age belonged to the first rank of hypocrites in Daisuke's estimate.
Sōseki Natsume
Climate Change is a bit like our advanced societies. Too late to "fix." The only choice left is that we adapt to what we've created.
Shilpa Menon
He framed a question inwardly to his vanity: 'Will this be tougher than I thought?
Sōseki Natsume
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Gustave Flaubert
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
Ayn Rand
It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
Jean Genet
When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they knew they were dying, and accepted it, almost gracefully. Now I saw that this wasn't so at all: they crept into corners in the hope of surviving, they only knew they were weakened and exposed, easy prey, and their instinct was to find a hidden place and try to outlive whatever it was they were suffering. It had been a mistake to imagine they wanted to be alone, to die in peace. Animals have no knowledge of death; for them, death is the unexpected end of life, something they resist by instinct, for no good reason. In that sense, their existence has an almost mechanical quality.
John Burnside
She rebuked herself for this thought. /she was, she saw, always having thoughts for which she rebuked herself. It then flashed across her mind that the thoughts for which she rebuked herself selfom turned out to be other than shrewd and fruitful thoughts nand she rebuked herself for this as well.
Patrick Hamilton
Say yes,’ he whispers. ‘Marry me.’I hesitate. I open my eyes. ‘You will get my fortune,’ I remark. ‘When I marry you, everything I have becomes yours. Just as George has everything that belongs to Isabel.’‘That’s why you can trust me to win it for you,’ he says simply. ‘When your interests and mine are the same, you can be certain that I will care for you as for myself. You will be my own. You will find that I care for my own.’‘You will be true to me?’‘Loyalty is my motto. When I give my word, you can trust me.
Philippa Gregory
all that was left to me was certain images and all of them spoke to me of the collapse of a cruel world and the slow construction in its stead of another world, equally cruel.
Carlos Fuentes
He was possessed now with that obsession for the cross in which so many lips have worn themselves away on crucifixes.
Émile Zola
It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
Gustave Flaubert
The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.
Dennis Potter
I did wonder what happened when we died, though, and I'd wondered about it for most of my life. Thinking that nothing happened, that there was absolutely nothing following all of this pain, seemed just as silly as magic. No, there had to be something.
David Joy
Your brother is a sensitive person. Aesthetically, ethically, and intellectually he is in fact hypersensitive. As a result, it would seem that he was born only to torture himself. He has none of that saving dullness of intelligence which sees little difference between A and B. To him it must be either A or B. And if it is to be A, its shape, degree, and shade of color must precisely match his own conception of it; otherwise he will not accept it. Your brother, being sensitive, is all his life walking on a line he has chosen—a line as precarious as a tight rope. At the same time he impatiently demands that others also tread an equally precarious rope, without missing their footing. It would be a mistake, though, to think that this stems from selfishness. Imagine a world which could react exactly the way your brother expects; that world would undoubtedly be far more advanced than the world as it is now. Consequently, he detests the world which is—aesthetically, intellectually, and ethically—not as advanced as he is himself. That's why it's different from mere selfishness, I think.
Sōseki Natsume
People were kind and friendly and amusing, but they thought that companionship and conversation were synonymous, and some of them had voices that jarred in your head. There was a lot to be said for dogs. They understood without telling you so, and they were always pleasing to look at, awake or asleep, like Bingo. He slept now, with little whistling snores, in his basket at the side of the fire, his stubby legs and one whiskery eyebrow twitching to the fitful tempo of his dreams.
Monica Dickens
And on the way home I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
Muriel Barbery
Raven: The Reverend Mr Larynx has been called off on duty, to marry or bury (I don't know which) some unfortunate person or persons, at Claydyke:...
Thomas Love Peacock
…If one who slays one is a murderer then he who slays a thousand is not a hero,' said Lalu.- Pg. #112, Across the Black Waters.
Mullk Raj Anand
No lesson is truly learned until it has been purchased with pain
Matthew Woodring Stover
You can't choose your childhood, it's just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that's really what (makes you).
Kim Stanley Robinson
here was no way of knowing what path he would take from there, but in order to survive as a human being, he was sure to arrive at the fate of having to incur the dislike of other human beings. When that time came, he would probably clothe himself inconspicuously, so as not to attract attention, and beggarlike, linger about the market places of man, in search of something.
Sōseki Natsume
God the EaterThere is a god in whom I do not believeYet to this god my love stretches,This god whom I do not believe in isMy whole life, my life and I am his.Everything that I have of pleasure and pain(Of pain, of bitter pain and men's contempt)I give this god for him to feed uponAs he is my whole life and I am his.When I am dead I hope that he will eatEverything I have been and have not beenAnd crunch and feed upon it and grow fatEating my life all up as it is his.
Stevie Smith
Sadly, it is within the religious domain that the phenomenon of rhetorical hysteria takes its most devastating form. I am aware that, in some minds, this tends to be regarded as a delicate subject. Let me declare very simply that I do not share such a sentiment. There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents. We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life. One of my all-time favourite lines comes from the black American poet Langston Hughes. It reads, simply, 'There is no lavender word for lynch'.
Wole Soyinka
Paris. City of love. City of dreams. City of splendour. City of saints and scholars. City of gaiety.Sink of iniquity.In two thousand years, Paris had seen it all.
Edward Rutherfurd
When the name of Gail Wynand became a threat in the publishing world, a group of newspaper owners took him aside-at a city charity affair which all had to attend-and reproached him for what they called hid debasement of the public taste."It is not my function" said Wynand, "to help people preserve a self-respect they haven't got. You give them what they profess to like in public, I give them what they really like. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to belive".
Ayn Rand
For all our penny-wisdom,’” he said, “‘for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts.
Joshua Ferris
We are much too tolerant of the moral aberration of statesmen and bureaucrats.
Kenzaburō Ōe
He still smelled of limes. It made saliva come into her mouth. It made her feel that before she had been sleepy, and now she was awake.
Monica Ali
For an instant he was able to cross the line and understand this strange loyalty of Jew to Jew. Those Jews who lived free in England were only there due to some quirk of fate instead of Aushwitz and every Jew knew that genocide could have happened to his own family except for that quirk of fate.Yet, as time stood suspended, Gilray was all gentiles who never quite understood Jews. He could befriend them, work with them, but never totally understand them. He was all white men who could never quite understand black men and all black men who could never quite understand whites. He was all normal men who could tolerate or even defend homosexuals...but never fully understand them.There is in us all that line that prevents us from fully understanding those who are different.
Leon Uris
As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón