Quotes by Novelists - Page 98

People seem to think that if a man is a Member of Parliament he may do what he pleases. ... Being in Parliament used to be something when I was young, but it won't make a make a gentleman now-a-days. It seems to me that none but brewers, and tallow-chandlers, and lawyers go into Parliament now.
Anthony Trollope
But for the overcrowded, for those who have little or nothing except, sometimes, courage and love, hope works differently. Hope is then something to bite on, to put between the teeth. Don't forget this. Be a realist. With hope between the teeth comes the strength to carry on even when fatigue never lets up, comes strength, when necessary, to choose not to shout at the wrong moment, comes the strength above all not to howl. A person, with hope between her or his teeth, is a brother or sister who commands respect.
John Berger
You ought to be blowing me kisses, wench.
George R.R. Martin
Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather, at the very source of its life! To confound this lust in man with that desire which unites the sexes is like confusing a tumor with the very organ which it devours, a tumor whose very deformity horribly reproduces the shape.
Georges Bernanos
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
Ayn Rand
Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
Laurence Sterne
Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.
Thomas Mann
The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.
George Sand
The anti-mind is the anti-life.
Ayn Rand
A poet is somebody who has written a poem.
Wallace Stegner
and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.
Gabriel García Márquez
On the nights they went to bed at the same time, Rocco would lie there and watch her go to the closet, watch her choose either silky slips or mannish shirts, like running up sex flags from across the room.
Richard Price
I sailed up to the cold stars but they were cold no longer, and I grew bigger and bigger until I was the stars and they were me, and I was Union, and for a single solitary glittering instant I was the universe.
George R.R. Martin
There's a strong message of divine righteousness in dictatorships. Every megalomaniac has to believe his actions are sanctioned by God.
Eric Gamalinda
The most popular persons are those who take the world as it is who find the least fault.
Charles Dudley Warner
Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain therefore to treat them as if they were equal.
J. A. Froude
He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself.
Hilary Mantel
As a child, I thought that war and peace were opposites. Yet I lived in peace when Vietnam was in flames and I didn't experience war until Vietnam had laid down its weapons. I believe that war and peace are actually friends, who mock us.
Kim Thúy
I don't suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don't trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It's a sure sign that they don't really know anyone.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
George Santayana
She never forgets a slight, real or imagined. She takes caution for cowardice and dissent for defiance. And she is greedy. Greedy for power, for honour, for love.
George R.R. Martin
English is so hierarchical. In Cree, we don't have animate-inanimate comparisons between things. Animals have souls that are equal to ours. Rocks have souls, trees have souls. Trees are 'who,' not 'what.
Tomson Highway
Allah protect us,' Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, 'In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.' In his years in Temur's army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite.
Kim Stanley Robinson
The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.
Sue Monk Kidd
It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden.
Muriel Spark
Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.
Shirley Jackson
Let his sword break and his shield shatter, Sansa thought coldly as she shoved out through the doors, let his courage fail him and every man desert him.
George R.R. Martin
How can I get up everyday knowing you had to kill yourself to make it stop hurting and I was here all the time and I never even saw it. And then you gave me this chance to make it better, convince you to stay alive and I couldn't do it. How can I live with myself after this, Jessie?
Marsha Norman
...you have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? And how may I become myself?
Paul Beatty
When I can't ride anymore, I shall keep horses as long as I can hobble around with a bucket and a wheelbarrow. When I can't hobble, I shall roll my wheelchair out to the fence of the field where my horses graze and watch them. Whether by wheelbarrow or wheelchair, I will do likewise to keep alive-as long as I can do as best I can-my connection with horses.
Monica Dickens
In the deep sands a man must hoard his water.
George R.R. Martin
Before one can learn truth, one must unlearn lies.
Matthew Woodring Stover
Learning kindness late in life was a kind of torture. The pain often came from the past, form kindnesses withheld. The knife was particularly sharp when those who most deserved your kindness were long gone. And unless you wanted to die of sorrow, you had to give this unspent kindness to those you loved less.
Victor Lodato
I also believe in cigarettes, cholesterol, alcohol, carbon monoxide, masturbation, the Arts Council, nuclear weapons, the Daily Telegraph, and not properly labeling fatal poisons, but above all else, most of all, I believe in the one thing that can come out of people's mouths: vomit.
Dennis Potter
But there is no value to suffering!
Anne Rice
The woman had gasped beneath his heavy body. He rubbed against her, lubricated by the warm, sticky liquid, but as her body gradually grew cold, he felt as though they'd been glued together. She seemed to be see-sawing between agony and ecstasy, but finally Satake pressed his lips over hers to quiet the groans-of pain or pleasure-that were leaking from her mouth. He found the hole that he had made in her side and worked his finger deep into the opening. Blood was pumping from the wound, staining their sex a gruesome crimson. He wanted to get further inside, to melt into her. As he was about to come, he pulled his lips from her and she whispered in his ear: "I'm finished . . . finished." "I know," he'd said, and he could still hear the exact sound of his own voice.
Natsuo Kirino
My lord father used to say a man should never draw his sword unless he means to use it.
George R.R. Martin
A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Thomas Mann
Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?
Andrew Sean Greer
I do not believe in decent women who do not know how to play the piano.
Gabriel García Márquez
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."]
Guy de Maupassant
Bessie was News, Leaders, and Gossip; Enid was Features, Make-up and general Sub. Whenever they were at a loss for copy they would mercilessly pillage ancient copies of Punch or Home Chat. An occasional hole in the copy was filled with a ghoulish smudge - local block-making had clearly indicated that somewhere a poker-work fanatic had gone quietly out of his mind. In this way the Central Balkan Herald was made up every morning and then delivered to the composition room where the chain-gang quickly reduced it to gibberish. MINISTER FINED FOR KISSING IN PUBIC. WEDDING BULLS RING OUT FOR PRINCESS. QUEEN OF HOLLAND GIVES PANTY FOR EX-SERVICE MEN. MORE DOGS HAVE BABIES THIS SUMMER IN BELGRADE. BRITAINS NEW FLYING-GOAT.
Lawrence Durrell
Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.
Gabriel García Márquez
Oh, how long were the days of a man.When he strode upon the broken land.He sailed as far as a man could steer.And he never wished to lose his fear.For the fear of man is a thing untold.It keeps him safe, and it proves him bold!Don’t let fear make you cease to strive,for that fear it proves you remain alive!I will walk this broken road,and I will carry a heavy load!So come at me with your awful lies,I’m a man of truth and I’ll meet your eyes!
Robert Jordan
Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.
Ayn Rand
The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
John Irving
..they were always asking me lots of questions. Questions I didn't want to answer. They wanted to get to know me. Yeah, well, I wasn't interested in being known. I wanted to buy a t-shirt that read: I AM UNKNOWNABLE.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
People are like that .... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.’ And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety -- it stands alongside our sameness.
John Irving
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.
Richard Llewellyn
Pretend to be mad and talk a lot. Then — and this is the important bit — do nothing at all until you absolutely have to and then make sure everyone dies.
Jasper Fforde
Victory settles a lot of arguments in most men's heads.
Robert Jordan
One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum
Walter Scott
In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.
Gustave Flaubert
You wear your honor like a suit of armor... You think it keeps you safe, but all it does is weigh you down and make it hard for you to move.
George R.R. Martin
We will not sleep, but will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You'll see me again. But you'll never know when. Hear that shifting, ambiguous rhythm, that promise of all things possible, and the ear is on its way to being free.
Richard Powers
Is it true,’ she said, ‘that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.’‘Well’, I answered annoyed, ‘that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.’‘But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?’‘And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?’‘More easily,’ she said, ‘much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream.
Jean Rhys
Misty is the color of rain on a window.
Anne Michaels
Please don’t tell me you know just how I feel--you don't.
Shirley Corder
I feel very happy to see the sun come up every day. I feel happy to be around. ... I like to take this day- any day-and go to town with it.
James Dickey
Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow.
Murasaki Shikibu