Fiction Quotes - Page 22

Whether or not the couple ends up together at the end of a book doesn't determine whether the book has a happy ending or not. As long as the two people end up happy, it doesn't really matter if they end up happy together.

A long time ago, there was a little girl called Mary. Now Mary, she was warned several times not to go to her neighbor’s house. Her neighbor was a grandmother. But Mary hardly listened, so she snuck off one night to spy on her. She tried the front door first, and it creaked open. Then suddenly, she heard a squeaking noise upstairs. She followed it – climbed up the wooden stairs where half of it was already rotten. She heard the squeaking noise again. It was coming from the library. She opened the door and hid behind a couch. She peered out, and she saw the grandmother.” Dave paused to drain his cup of coffee before continuing. My heart thudded so loudly, I thought that everyone could hear it. “So Mary gasped in disbelief as she heard the squeaking noise again, and the grandmother’s rocking chair was not moving at all. Then the grandmother opened her eyes and looked directly at her, holding her gaze steadily and sharply, and then suddenly, BOO!

It was important to tell people. To let people know that this can happen. Your child's body can stop. Stop breathing, stop beating.

Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives.

I begin my life. I live again. I meet a young girl called Valeria. She smiles easily. She laughs tender sounds that pull at my heart. I’m too young to be profound but she makes me feel so safe. So cherished. I am thirty years old. I bump into a woman I knew when she was a girl. Valeria looks annoyed to see me. She lives in the future. Where the world is turning. I live within the past. Where the people are trapped and screaming and alone. I live within the past when Valeria and I were in love. She’s waiting for the cab to come, her foot tapping against the sidewalk. Her eyes glancing at her watch every few minutes. I’m eager to reunite our lives through some kind of friendship. I’m so eager to know her again, as she was when she was a child. But Valeria lives within the future. I live within the past. Have the two ever gotten along? Have they ever even met?

But what reality was ever made by realists?

I hardly know her but whenever I see her I lose my mind. I know I should run away, but I can’t.“That’s called sexual attraction, honey,” Max said. “It’s very nice. But be careful. It can burn you bad. Believe me I know.

Entah mengapa, mendadak dia merasa bahwa berkenalan dengan si pemilik nama itu sepertinya akan menyenangkan.

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.

Dear, he do have a problem.

You can’t blame yourself for what Socrates did. Those birds came because he wanted them to come, at least a part of him did. The pissed off part. Let that roll around in your brain for a while.”Jamie considered this. “No, Eddie. The hurt part, that’s what did it.”The crow shrieked again. It seemed louder, and that meant it was closer. Or maybe it was another crow, maybe several. Jamie and Eddie looked toward the sky, listening to the screams. Jamie spoke first.“We can’t let it happen again. We may be the only ones who know the truth about what Socrates can do.” “That thought probably has occurred to Socrates too.

Don’t touch me. Don’t tell me how beautiful my eyes are, how soft my hair is, how you love to hear my voice. Don’t. Don’t pretend you are falling in love with me. I know you are lying, and every word you say hurts even more. Let us just be friends, if we can start there. Can’t we? Can’t we at least be friends? Get to know each other a little? Before the wedding, and the bedding, when I will have to take you as my lord and husband?

I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk

Darla shook her head, a small smirk on her lips. “You’re such a mom,” she told Katherine.Katherine stared at her, puzzled. “You’re a mom, too,” she said softly.“No, I gave birth. That doesn’t make me a mom. Not like you.”A look passed between the two women like none they had ever shared before. For a split second, Katherine felt a slight connection. “Well, you rest. I’ll check on you later.” She turned and left the room, a funny, unexplainable feeling inside her.

I'd never known that I could feel this broken and whole at once.

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Thainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú Americanus, or more colloquially, fukú-generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and Doom of the New World.

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.

Be determined. Be persistent. Be consistent," the muse said. "Then he looked at me and winked. "Never give up, dumb-ass.

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

She has no interest in human quarrels, for they are often petty and always pointless.

Would the man in the cabin have come after them? Would he have sent someone else? Or would he have never even known they were there and they could have just gone back to normal life.Normal Life. He didn’t even know what that would be now.

One word absent from a sentence, or misinterpreted incorrectly, can change the entire meaning of a sentence. One word can change the meaning of everything. Before you believe anything about God or anybody, ask yourself how well do you trust the transmitter, translator or interpreter. And if you have never met them, then how do you know if the knowledge you acquired is even right? One hundred and twenty-five years following every major event in history, all remaining witnesses will have died. How well do you trust the man who has stored his version of a story? And how can you put that much faith into someone you don't know?

I would like to think of myself as an artist...excluding the part where he bows before an audience. There are no appreciations for killings.

Your mother won a special reward," she told me, "because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded.

My mother picked me up in her arms, touching my checks comforting my distress. I stared into her eyes and held her hair in my small hands, for the first time realizing what a moment in time meant. I touched her cheek and then looked away, knowing this was the truth to life, and there was nothing I could do about it. The truth that her death would one day occur made me realize that I never wanted her to leave my side. It was something I could not control, something no one could ever stop no matter how strong they were.

Amateur detectives in fiction had always annoyed Ella. They were so unrealistic. She didn’t intend to be the Rabbit Back version of Miss Marple or a cheap Baker Street knock-off, and she really didn’t like the idea of making the tabloids. That was no way to advance an academic career. She didn’t want to be an instrument of justice. She just wanted to do some literary research and earn a living.

My creativity keeps me from starving. Humanity keeps my life mundane. Loving secures my love for life, but my imagination keeps me sane.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!

I never said you had to like it. You have to accept it. No regret. - Claire Harding - Boone Holler

When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst-but it wasn't a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you'd been missing.

As it turned out, the sachem had been dead wrong.The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, said the old women in charge of the children, he had apologized for this error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapsed from ignorance or disease more would always come. They would come with languages that sounded like a dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred place and worship a dull, unimaginative god. They let their hogs browse the ocean shore turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again. Cut loose from the earth's soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples.

No, not really. But …” Okay, I couldn’t help but gloat a little. “She likes me.”Samedi didn’t even look at me. “Well of course, you’ve had that bloody uniform on all day. I was half ready to tell you how much I liked you.

Sure, Bob Dylan had some good songs. But he could have been a doctor.

Sin says, "Do you think that people get married with aspirations to divorce? Do you think that people try drugs with the motive to be addicted? No. It is not merely the act that you see taking place, but it is I that has taken their minds captive. I have played the lobes of their minds like the strings on a harp; soothing them and making them feel, see, and hear the images that they desire in their innermost being.

While the stories are fiction, the journey is real.

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?

Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.

C.J. had once believed that he understood who he was, what he was about, what he was capable of. But when the moment came to act upon these convictions, he discovered that his knowledge of self was faulty. Had his lack of killer instinct been a momentary lapse, first time jitters? Or was there more to it than that? If not the fearless, remorseless man he supposed himself to be, then just who was he?

Find my weak points, but more importantly, find yours.

Once upon a time I thought I could change stories, make them go the way I wanted, instead of where they actually went.

It was past midnight. From the carpark of the apartment blocks, a human figure with an unsteady gait emerged.

She puts her hands on either side of my face, and the room falls away. I have never gotten so lost in a kiss before. And then, the space between us explodes. My heart keeps missing beats and my hands cannot bring her close enough to me. I taste her and realize I have been starving. I have loved before, but it didn't feel like this.I have kissed before, but it didn't burn me alive. Maybe it lasts a minute, and maybe it's an hour. All I know is that kiss, and how soft her skin is when it brushes against mine, and that even if I did not know it until now, I have been waiting for this person forever.

Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture's memory.

Sow a thought and reap an action, sow an action and reap a habit, sow a habit and reap a destiny - John Cleaver

I don't know how the Wolfman knows all this, but he's not wrong. My warm cheeks turn scalding hot. "Your shame is a good sign. You may break sooner than I thought. The breaking is good. It purifies.

You’re as plain as the nose on your face,” said Mr. Pennyworth. “And your nose is remarkably obvious. As is the rest of your face, young man. As are you. For the sake of all that is holy, empty your mind. Now. You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody.

Not really hungry.""She’ll eat." Pritkin said curtly."I said —""If you starve to death it would damage my professional reputation.""I eat plenty.""The same does not apply should I strangle you in understandable irritation, however.""I’ll have a sandwich," I told Nick. "No meat.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

If you are going to write a book,Make sure it is going to be worth reading .

Normal life is presentable. In normal life, you clean up the kitchen and keep your balcony tidy and take care of your children. It's hard work--harder than one might think.

I am also an author. Please check out my novel, A Life Worth Dreaming About.

Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.

It's 1am, I have fiction to write!

No,” I said. “I can’t remember doing this.”“Oh,” Rena made and gestured dramatically. “You don’t remember it. And that automatically means you didn’t do it?

That's the fashion. Fast as the speed of light, they say. Ha! It's got no soul, sir, no heart.

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

Although when there were too many people around- which there certainly were today- it was hard even to remember to say thank you: all those people were like drowning.

Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?

Heavy is the head that holds the pen of creation. We construct these characters from nothing, molding them from our imaginations. We give them hopes and dreams and unique personalities until they feel so real you’re mind believes it must be so. We watch them grow by our hands, not always knowing the paths they will choose with the obstacles we throw at them. They take on a life of their own and often surprise even us by their actions we couldn’t have imagined before it poured out of us onto the paper. We could change it if we really wanted to, but it would be forced and not be true to the characters. And when something tragic happens and one is lost, we feel that loss even though we know they were not a friend, a family member or even ourselves. It can be a hard thing to voice sometimes, to give tribute to the one’s left behind with the real sadness over something not so real. But we find the words and press on to the next challenge, because that's what good writers do.