Fiction Quotes - Page 18

I wasn’t sure what was worse: being oblivious or living within reality. (Eric)

I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you’re a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you’re a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie.

There are times when the unseen can be even more dangerous than what our eyes behold.

Then someone within closed the door, shutting Norah out into the howling dust of the night. The clouds parted briefly to reveal the full moon's cold eye, then closed again. Wind seared over the pavilion's double roof, its voice rising to a shriek. Distantly, among the maze of walls, came the frenzied barking of hundreds of tiny dogs. As she drifted towards wakefulness, Norah could not tell whether it was the wind that she heard just at the end, or whether, within the dark hall, the girl had begun to scream.

The truth, as much as people acted like they wanted to hear it, was sometimes too cruel and harsh.

She looked so beautiful, with every smile of hers, I was falling for her. She had the perfect set of teeth for the perfect face to make up that perfect smile.

But everything evened out eventually, didn’t it – every wave subsided, lapsed back into the ocean, returning, giving them time to put themselves back together again. He was her moon. He balanced out her tides.

The difference between nonfiction and fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

A very important function of intelligence is the ability to premeditate. ~ Aarush Kashyap

Even the fiercest of anarchists lose their teeth to age.

You should never read just for "enjoyment." Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick "hard books." Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, "I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth." Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of "literature"? That means fiction, too, stupid.

There's nothing quite as funny as someone else's misery - Cassel Sharpe

Dying is not a solution.. I want to live with You..!

To write is to reveal oneself.When I write something, fiction or non-fiction, I do not expect you to accept what I write, nor to agree with what I propose.I expect you to spend at least a tenth of a second to think about it - may be not about the characters, nor about the piece, but at least about the idea.

Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too.

Lo! A call for a bloody trial-Retribution should it hail!Whose? you ask,For he that deems it a worthy task!

You battled monsters. You sweat and cried your way to this one prolific moment where you finally realize that those dark days and sleepless nights were pre-requisites to your becoming.

Most of the time, we see only what we want to see, or what others tell us to see, instead of really investigate to see what is really there. We embrace illusions only because we are presented with the illusion that they are embraced by the majority. When in truth, they only become popular because they are pounded at us by the media with such an intensity and high level of repetition that its mere force disguises lies and truths. And like obedient schoolchildren, we do not question their validity and swallow everything up like medicine. Why? Because since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.

How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind [pseudoscience/'woo'], for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

Maybe because I knew Haze and Kate so well by then the passage leapt out at me, clear and sharp as di

But you've slipped under my skin, invaded my blood and seized my heart

Bonnie, believe in me. I’ll save you.I remember how to fly.

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras.

I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.

I am a knight riding from tower to tower seeking a princess to rescue but all the dragons are slain, the towers are empty and the princesses taken.

If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.

As a fiction writer I am not always sure where reality ends and non reality begins, when sane thoughts become less than sane, or what is imagination versus undiscovered truth, but ultimately, it is my job to make you as unsure as I am.

Writing a modern novel in a national language hence means writing with the awareness that you inhabit the same world as others around the globe. You see the same world map and the same world history as your contemporaries elsewhere, though how each of you interprets and relates the same historical events may vary greatly.

We all move on from history to chance, sorrow to sorrow, hope to hope, joy to joy. Read the book of fiction on the theme. its title is FROM HISTORY TO CHANCE

Its magnificence was indescribable, and its magnitude was inconceivable. She felt overwhelmed in the presence of its greatness. Pg 87

Join us next time for Days of the Undead when Rachel learns her long lost brother is really a crown prince from outer space.

I have seen many cases like N. during the five years I've been in practice. I sometimes picture these unfortunates as men and women being pecked to death by predatory birds. The birds are invisible - at least until a psychiatrist who is good, or lucky, or both, sprays them with his version of Luminol and shines the right light on them - but they are nevertheless very real. The wonder is that so many OCDs manage to live productive lives, just the same. They work, they eat (often not enough or too much, it's true), they go to movies, they make love to their girlfriends and boyfriends, their wives and husbands . . . and all the time those birds are there, clinging to them and pecking away little bits of flesh.

I congratulate you on your success stealing the painting.

Lucy: I don't feel like talking about college. It increases my stress level.James: And increased stress levels lead to hair loss.Lucy: My head-hair volume is fine.James: You say that like I should be concerned about leg-hair volume.

I’m not above using unsavory beings to kick the Gods’ asses, but the Phantoms are too unpredictable for my taste,” I said.

You can't force love, I realized. It's there or it isn't. If it's not there, you've got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you've got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love.

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)

String of fate brings two people together and it is love's job to keep them there.

Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape.

He told himself she wasn’t really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear.

Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he'd come to realize, was a forgiving nature.

This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof with three shingles and a pretty birdpath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs.Shaw, her tied back with a scarf, cleaning with a dainty skimmer.How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl’s backyard, and then, smoking and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to bher bright magic?

The audience-- the book's actual cast-- quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn't help) so the source material-- surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality-- had to be reshaped.

No matter how hard you try to create a story that's completely fictional, parts of your own experience are bound to surface.

...I retreat into my fictional world where everything makes sense - but even there I can't even control what people do...

I came, I saw, I concurred...

No one in Cattaraugus had much idea of what an artist’ colony might be. “Art” itself was viewed with suspicion, scorn. There was the sense, as people like my mother conveyed it, of a fraud, a hustle. “Art” was putting something over on someone, the way politicians did. “Art” was a sorry excuse for not being productive, useful. “Art” was vanity, pretension.

How charming. The king and his little princess knocking on my covens door.” Ursula sighed dramatically. “What do you insolent merfolks want with me now? I swear I haven’t eaten any of your children.”-Ursula

How can I be more important than someone else? Isn’t every life important?

for he had acquired, as time went on, the firm conviction that any thought, even the most audacious, that any fiction, even the most insane, can one day materialize and see its fulfillment in space and time.

He had gone again and, emboldened by his first successful trip, had chosen a different sort of world to enter, that of THE MONK. He had studied the book with great care and finally selected a passage that was purely descriptive.The result was the same. The instant he closed the top of the showcase, he was transported to the world described in the open pages. He found himself standing - and shivering - in a dank corridor that, he knew, was far underground. Feeble candlelight flickered in the distance, off to his left. Water dripped down the gleaming walls and startled rats scurried past his feet. The air was stale and unpleasant. Down the corridor to his left, he could hear singing but could not make out the words. Then suddenly, from his right, he heard a woman's high-pitched scream, its sound caroming off the wet, stone walls of the passageway. He jumped, his skin crawling at the back of his neck.And found himself back in his warm and familiar room.("I Shall Not Leave England Now")

Memory is an artist, an impressionist. She adds colour, sound, smell and emotion to events at her whim. She adds, subtracts and embellishes until the event she started documenting is quite unrecognisable to the others who also experienced it, but at the same time, is more truthful to the owner of the memory. There is no reality. There are only impres- sions of past events, made by a million selves, all interacting with each other, vying for superiority. Reality doesn’t exist, perhaps in the end, that’s my only truth.

I don't watch reality TV, my reality is tough enough.

I wanted stories, and I wanted them always, and I wanted the experience that only fiction could give me: I wanted to be inside them.

Even a Menno sheltered from the world knows not to stick her tongue into the mouth of a boy who owns an Air Supply record. You might stick your tongue into the mouth of a boy who owned some Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but you would not date him on a regular basis, or openly.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

whatever beauty she thought she might have possessed she realized had only been through her husband's assessment of her

I never take out clients. It’s bad policy.” He looked me straight in the eyes as he said it. Reaching across for the glove compartment, his arm accidentally brushed my leg.