Quotes by Novelists - Page 99

[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
Howard Nemerov
True love's the gift which God has given To man alone beneath the heaven: It is not fantasy's hot fire Whose wishes soon as granted fly It liveth not in fierce desire.
Sir Walter Scott
My angels are jellyfish,electric, nearly invisible,armed with poisoned harpoons.My archangels are yellow tang.They feed on sunlight.They speak through color.Anything in their paths turns blind.
Eric Gamalinda
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet.
James Oppenheim
A great Tamil poet, given to decadence and debauchery, once said that the story of his life could serve as an example to the youth on how one shouldnot live. Having lived, or rather, having sleepwalked for ten years through the desolate wastelands of depression, I survived to reach the other side. I believe that this validates my claim to write this book for you.
Indu Muralidharan
No mortal man could frighten him, no more than the darkness could, nor the bones of his soul, the grey and grisly bones of his soul.
George R.R. Martin
Stormy husky brawling City of the Big Shoulders.
Carl Sandburg
We are born crying, and for good reason,' he reflected. 'And the rest of our lives is bound to be a muted reiteration of that cry.
Françoise Sagan
Where had they all gone to, he often pondered; those threads he had once held together, how far had they scattered, some to break, others to weave into unknown patterns? The strange randomness of the world beguiled him, that randomness which never would, so long as the world lasted, give meaning to those choruses again.
James Hilton
If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.
John Fowles
His brow is seamed with line and scar;His cheek is red and dark as wine;The fires as of a Northern starBeneath his cap of sable shine.His right hand, bared of leathern glove,Hangs open like an iron gin,You stoop to see his pulses move,To hear the blood sweep out and in.He looks some king, so solitaryIn earnest thought he seems to stand,As if across a lonely seaHe gazed impatient of the land.Out of the noisy centuriesThe foolish and the fearful fade;Yet burn unquenched these warrior eyes,Time hath not dimmed, nor death dismayed.
Walter de la Mare
Don't seek, let go & what you are searching for will find you.
Shilpa Menon
How could you believe or disbelieve anything anymore? Four maybe five million men killed and none of them wanting to die while hundreds maybe thousands were left crazy or blind or crippled and couldn’t die no matter how hard they tried.
Dalton Trumbo
Our worst misfortunes never happen and most miseries lie in anticipation.
Honoré de Balzac
When he speaks into your ear so thatno one can hear, he will say he is your slave, that he’s passed to you from Deirdre. But it’s a lie, my dear,a vicious lie. He’ll make you his and drive you mad if you refuse to do his will. That is what he’s done tothem all.’ She stopped, her wrinkled brows tightening, her eyes drifting off across the dusty surface of thetable. ‘Except for those who were strong enough to rein him in and make him the slave he claimed to be,and use him for their own ends… ’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Their own endless wickedness.
Anne Rice
Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.
John Fowles
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Wallace Stegner
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
Ayn Rand
There’d never been anyone who could knife him so with a momentary word, and then speak the wound away in the very next moment. If all those little boyhood heartbreaks had been supposed to make him ready for this, Demane wasn’t.
Kai Ashante Wilson
It is the privilege of the richTo waste the time of the poorTo water with tears in secretA tree that grows in secretThat bears fruit in secretThat ripened falls to the ground in secretAnd manures the parent treeOh the wicked tree of hatred and the secretThe sap rising and the tears falling.
Stevie Smith
But the boredom of Frau Spatz had by now reached that pitch where it distorts the countenance of man, makes the eyes protrude from the head, and lends the features a corpselike and terrifying aspect. More than that, this music acted on the nerves that controlled her digestion, producing in her dyspeptic organism such malaise that she was really afraid she would have an attack.
Thomas Mann
With other women he had not been able to touch their flesh without experiencing the desire to devour it, as though ravenous with an abominable hunger to butcher them. But this one, could he then love her, and not kill her?
Émile Zola
Harsh justice is still justice.
George R.R. Martin
I would rather die of passion than of boredom.
Émile Zola
You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached.
Ayn Rand
I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
William Golding
Egotism: the art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.
George Higgins
...the literary manifestation of the mind-body dichotomy that dominates today's culture: the split between the "serious" and the "entertaining" - the belief that if a literary work is "serious," it must bore people to death; and if it is "entertaining," it must not communicate anything of importance. (Which means that "the good" has to be painful, and that pleasure has to be mindlessly low-grade.)
Ayn Rand
Let us not despise the woman who is neither mother nor daughter nor wife. Let us not limit our esteem to family life, narrow our tolerance to simple egotism. Given that heaven rejoices more at the repentance of one sinner than over a hundred good men who have never sinned, let us endeavor to make heaven rejoice. We may be rewarded with interest. Let us leave along the path the alms of our forgiveness for those whose earthly desires have marooned them, so that a divine hope may save them, and, as the wise old women say when they prescribe a remedy of their own invention, if it doesn't help, at least it can't hurt.
Alexandre Dumas fils
Wild creatures' eyes, the colonel said,Are innocent and fathomlessAnd when I look at them I seeThat they are not aware of meAnd oh I find and oh I blessA comfort in this emptinessThey only see me when they wantTo pounce upon me at the hunt;But in the tame varietyThere couches an anxietyAs if they yearned, yet knew not whatThey yearned for, nor they yearned for not.And so my dog would look at meAnd it was pitiful to seeSuch love and such dependency.The human heart is not at easeWith animals that look like these.
Stevie Smith
We priests are sneered at and always shall be—the accusation is such an easy one—as deeply envious, hypocritical haters of virility. Yet whosoever has experienced sin must know that lust, with its parasitic growth, is for ever threatening to stifle virility as well as intelligence. Impotent to create, it can only contaminate in the germ the frail promise of humanity; it is probably at the very source, the primal cause of all human blemishes; and when amid the windings of this huge jungle whose paths are unknown, we encounter Lust, just as she is, as she emerged forth from the hands of the Master of Prodigies, the cry from our hearts is not only terror but imprecation: 'You, you alone have set death loose upon the world!
Georges Bernanos
The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother's milk. Darkness will make you strong.
George R.R. Martin
I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.
Carlos Fuentes
Do not consider Collectivists as "sincere but deluded idealists". The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not "idealistic," no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
Ayn Rand
From the days of old, those who walk in the way have replaced those who deviate therefrom; those who lack virtue have fallen before those who possess it. Can one escape fate?
Luo Guanzhong
One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.
Anthony Powell
Tell no man anything, for no man listensYet hold thy lips ready to speak.
Carl Sandburg
People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus.
Edna Ferber
You prepare as best you can for the bad times- then live every moment with joy.
Shirley Rousseau Murphy
An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.
Henry Fielding
What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.
Edmund Wilson
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.
Sue Monk Kidd
A majority is always better than the best repartee.
Benjamin Disraeli
The true champions of a nation's freedom are those who reject the limitations of stereotypes and affirm the rich diversity of human nature to be found.
Vasily Grossman
And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
Gustave Flaubert
Depression weakens a person at every level and bullies can smell weakness like dogs smell fear.
Indu Muralidharan
No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
Cesare Pavese
So off had gone John to the wars again. But he had not remained for long in the position of a humble volunteer. Colonel Clifton, commanding the 1st Regiment of Dragoons, no sooner heard that Crazy Jack was back then he enrolled him as an extra aide-de-camp.
Georgette Heyer
I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.
Ayn Rand
Florentino Ariza never had anotheropportunity to see or talk to Fermina Daza alone in the many chanceencounters of their very long lives until fifty-one years and ninemonths and four days later, when he repeated his vow of eternalfidelity and everlasting love on her first night as a widow.
Gabriel García Márquez
A man should not glory in what he already knows but in what he has yet to learn.
Robert Stephen Parry
If I had received good instruction as a child I would be with my family today and at peace with my neighbors. I hope and pray that all you parents in the sound of my voice will train up your children in the way they should go.
Charles Portis
No hay palanca más poderosa que una creencia para mover las multitudes humanas no en vano se dice que la religión liga y aprieta a los hombres
Emilia Pardo Bazán
Well, if that’s what you call being at peace, for heaven’s sake just warn me before you go to war, will you?
Sinclair Lewis
Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They’ve already lived their lives.
Edmund White
The sea is a desert of waves,A wilderness of water.
Langston Hughes
You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies -which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world -what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.
Joseph Conrad
I was in '78 recently," he announced. "I brought you this."He handed me a single by the Beatles. I didn't recognize the title."Didn't they split in '70?""Not always. How are things?
Jasper Fforde
As she rounded a corner one of her favourite songs came on the radio, and sunlight filtered through the trees the way it does with lace curtains, reminding her of her grandmother, and tears began to slide down her cheeks. Not for her grandmother, who was then still very much among the living, but because she felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. It overwhelmed her, made her pull the car to the side of the road. Afterwards she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it. Now, however, she knows she wasn’t being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It’s a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won’t last forever.
Steven Galloway