Fiction Quotes - Page 3

When it comes to who will like your writing; the ones who will like it will like it because they can relate to the story or can find a piece of their own story hidden within - regardless of the mistakes. The ones who won't, never will - no matter what.

Writing is a bittersweet addiction. The more it drains you; the more replenished you feel, and you crave it even more.

All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction....Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving--amateurs--we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers--should we be lucky enough to find any--some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff that we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

Writing is a form of running away. Running away to a place you made with your own hand.

Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time.

Fairy tales, fantasy, legend and myth...these stories, and their topics, and the symbolism and interpretation of those topics...these things have always held an inexplicable fascination for me," she writes. "That fascination is at least in part an integral part of my character — I was always the kind of child who was convinced that elves lived in the parks, that trees were animate, and that holes in floorboards housed fairies rather than rodents.You need to know that my parents, unlike those typically found in fairy tales — the wicked stepmothers, the fathers who sold off their own flesh and blood if the need arose — had only the best intentions for their only child. They wanted me to be well educated, well cared for, safe — so rather than entrusting me to the public school system, which has engendered so many ugly urban legends, they sent me to a private school, where, automatically, I was outcast for being a latecomer, for being poor, for being unusual. However, as every cloud does have a silver lining — and every miserable private institution an excellent library — there was some solace to be found, between the carved oak cases, surrounded by the well–lined shelves, among the pages of the heavy antique tomes, within the realms of fantasy.Libraries and bookshops, and indulgent parents, and myriad books housed in a plethora of nooks to hide in when I should have been attending math classes...or cleaning my room...or doing homework...provided me with an alternative to a reality I didn't much like. Ten years ago, you could have seen a number of things in the literary field that just don't seem to exist anymore: valuable antique volumes routinely available on library shelves; privately run bookshops, rather than faceless chains; and one particular little girl who haunted both the latter two institutions. In either, you could have seen some variation upon a scene played out so often that it almost became an archetype:A little girl, contorted, with her legs twisted beneath her, shoulders hunched to bring her long nose closer to the pages that she peruses. Her eyes are glued to the pages, rapt with interest. Within them, she finds the kingdoms of Myth. Their borders stand unguarded, and any who would venture past them are free to stay and occupy themselves as they would.

everything happens for a reason.

He had always liked a good mess—God knows he had sure made a few. In typical form, he squared his shoulders, furrowed his brows and muttered, “bring it on.

Do you think we can be friends?” I asked.He stared up at the ceiling. “Probably not, but we can pretend.

Rogerson," I asked him sweetly as we sat watching a video in the pool house, "where would I find the pelagic zone?""In the open sea," he said. "Now shut up and eat your Junior Mints.

Once upon a time,’ is code for ‘I’m lying to you.’ We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy—that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us.

Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.

Sketches of mad skies spilling stars caught in spiraling gyres, diagrams for constructing sextants tall as a man and armillary spheres to mimic the motion of the cosmos. He decides that he must have all of it, that he will cram the little observatory with maps and charts, clocks and compasses, and instruments for bringing the sky nearer.

Whenever I come across someone speaking negatively about escapism or looking down on those who seek a temporary escape from this world, I can't help but look at them as absolute fools. To deny someone the right to find temporary peace in escapism is to deny human nature itself as well as all the benefits of such a beautiful concept. Often times, these instances show them saying that "it'll only make things worse" or "it's not gonna change anything", except, a lot of times, that's not the case at all. How many times has someone shut themselves away from the world by listening to a song they hold dear only to return more ready to face the world than before, how many times has someone learned something about themselves through the fictional events of a novel that they wouldn't have other wise, how many times has society experienced great change through people who dreamed of making the world a better place, only to eventually make those dreams into a reality.

There is power in controlling something that can do so much damage-in controlling something, period.

You’re a talking cat?” Endora asked with a look of disbelief on her face.“My, my, my, aren’t you the bright bulb of the bunch,” he replied with a bit of snarky smugness. “Tell me then, bright-bulb, do you suppose that I need your permission to talk just because I’m a cat?” He raised his paw to his face, admiring his newly gnawed manicure. After he observed the last nail, he slapped his paw down on the floorboards, making a low thud sound. “Because I don’t,” he smirked.Endora was taken by surprise at his rudeness. She stared back at him, speechless and not quite sure how to respond. “Are you a magic cat?” Mila busted in with a question that seemed as silly to her as to the cat.He glared and narrowed his eyes at her. “A magic cat,” he said, standing up to arch his furry back. “Is my talking some sort of magic to you? If it is… then I am.” He stretched his back higher and let out a long purr that turned into, “Purrhaps, you four little witchy girls should clearly refine your meaning of magic so you know what it means before you say the word magic.” “I rather am quite fond of talking cats,” Selena said with a big smile. “Of course, you’re the first one I’ve ever seen.”The cat narrowed its eyes tighter. “Indeed,” he said, letting out a yawn as if the whole conversation were a bore. He leapt off the porch and dash away, mumbling and grumbling his way down the corridor. Selena looked over at Endora. “Rude little snot, isn’t he?” she said.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

If there was one advantage of the numerous lifetimes he’d been forced to endure, it was undoubtedly knowledge.

Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.

Can't say I've ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending anytime. You know where you are with an ending.

I asked her what a true story was because I thought that all stories were made up. She said a true story was called fact, and a made-up story was called ficton. Auntie May said a made-up story is a bit like telling lies, only the people who read them knew that already and so it didn’t matter

Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You.

And she knows then that she was right about her brother, that it takes an unbelievable strength to feel this kind of grief, and she doesn't know if she can handle it, because it really hurts, hurts her more than the razor ever could.

She fixed a smile that she hoped looked authentic. Pretending to be content continued to be hard work.

Life was a swirl of mysteries, each one waiting to be plucked up and explored, but not necessarily solved. As the weight of responsibility bore down on a person, it could feel like a long list of chores leading up to the final one - figuring out how to die with dignity. But Quincy’s interpretation of his surroundings seemed a truer representation of life’s meaning, or rather, the lack of meaning other than to dazzle and delight and befuddle from cradle to grave.

Where does fiction end and reality begin?

Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.

You can't make a fan of everyone. Stay true to your story, characters, music, art or whatever it is you do and fuck everyone else who doesn't like it. Life isn't perfect.

There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.

Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.

. . .but he'd seen elite warriors go down in flames enough times to struggle with the sovereignty of God yet yield to it

it’s the way he uses language—which is nothing like the way fantasists used language before him. There’s no sense of nostalgia. There’s no medieval floridness. There’s no fairy tale condescension to the child reader. It’s very straight, and very clean—there’s no Vaseline on the lens. You see everything clearly, not with sparkles or a flowery sense of wonderment, but with very specific physical details.

Poetry is a tool for writers to create literature in different forms of expression and messages.

I have read that long ago there was a land of glass castles that sank beneath the sea. It was not called Atlantis, but Lyonesse. This happened before history and across the ocean, but when I was little I wondered about that place, how it could be so beautiful and so lost. Sometimes it seemed that the land around my New England home was like that flooded country, with mud where the streets of gold should be and mayflies swarming where there should be lovely fishes, but here and there a shard of crystal to call the heart to beauty. --"Wetlands," in Phoebe.

Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...

No girl can forget the day she lost her virginity, or the circumstance that led to it

The old are often forgotten. Life moves on without a care for those who wish to remain in the past. We tend to talk too much because it’s rare that we’re listened to.

Walking out into the night with a water fey was all kinds of stupid. Heck, Kelpies eat people. They may not play with their food as creatively as the Each Uisge, but dead is dead.

Bearing witness from the sides of the room, ten or more lepers shouted at the bizarre scene, “Diable! Diable!” And then chants of some sort, or prayers, followed by more shouts of “Diable!” They were hurling these words at Moreau like stones.

Procuring the house in Ballister was a desperate bid for respect, for recognition, the ultimate gesture (or sacrifice, as it turned out) that would prove him a worthy successor to the Flo and Walter Prices of the world. To my mind, the Culver was Norm’s way home, the only way he knew. It was an ever-evolving means to an ever-evolving end that eventually ended him. Who or what led Norm down that thorny path—devotion, economic pressures, family cynicism, Beth’s insatiable appetite—has been a topic of endless debate. You can believe what you want to believe. Personally, I don’t think any rational argument under the sun would have deterred Beth’s “messiah” from his mission. If the Ballister acquisition was Norm’s cross, as everyone seems to think it was, then it was Norm who chose to bear that cross. And pride that nailed him to it.

If you intend to heal the breach,” she went on, “as you claim. If you intend to abide by the treaty we have both signed, then I am the Emperor, Annur’s Emperor, and your Emperor, and you will address me properly.”“I’ve always found that those most insistent on their titles,” Moss replied, “are those least deserving of them.

Laughter comes from living." I shrug, try to sound indifferent. "I've never really been alive before.

I look up at the ceiling, at all the hardcover fiction. So very few people want it. It is operating as insulation rather than stock. The argument rages on about whether it is better to have books or ebooks, but while everyone gets heated about the choices, the hardcover fiction molders quietly away.

Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

The best fiction is true.

Better he think me rude than not think at all.

And why is it all men thinkeverything a woman writes is trivial or trashy-or just plain sillydrivel? Don't men have romantic notions? Don't men dream of findingthe perfect love?

We want to fight.”“And I want J.K. Rowling to keep writing in the Potterverse, but I know that’s never going to happen,” I said blithely.

Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.

Exhaustion was pressing upon and overpowering her. "Good-by--because I love you." He did not know; he did not understand. He would never understand. Perhaps Doctor Mandelet would have understood if she had seen him--but it was too late; the shore was far behind her, and her strength was gone.She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again.

Your hair is like butterflies,” Sebastian said, giggling like a child.“That’s nice,” Firen said impatiently. “Keep moving.”“Fantastic. I always like my days better with a touch of insanity,” Gabriella quipped.

Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth and legend, our ancestors believed to be history and everything in our history includes myths and legends. Before the splendid modern-day mind was formed our cultures and civilizations were conceived in the wombs of, and born of, what we identify today as "fiction, unreality, myth, legend, fantasy, folklore, imaginations, fabrications and tall tales." And in our suddenly realized glory of all our modern-day "advancements" we somehow fail to ask ourselves the question "Who designated myths and legends as unreality? " But I ask myself this question because who decided that he was spectacular enough to stand up and say to our ancestors "You were all stupid and disillusioned and imagining things" and then why did we all decide to believe this person? There are many realities not just one. There is a truth that goes far beyond what we are told today to believe in. And we find that truth when we are brave enough to break away from what keeps everybody else feeling comfortable. Your reality is what you believe in. And nobody should be able to tell you to believe otherwise.

It is ourselves we encounter whenever we invent fictions.

Fact and fiction are different truths.

The first sight I beheld when I first awakened was a pair of eyes filled with pure adoration and a joyful grin that shone more brightly than the afternoon sun. Though he hadn’t spoken a single word, I knew exactly who he was. He was my creator … my Lord … my God.

It's better to lose some of battles in the struggle for your dreams than to be defeated without ever even knowing what you're fighting for.

American houses...' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?

Misunderstandings arise only in undefined relationships

With the Black Company series Glen Cook single-handedly changed the face of fantasy—something a lot of people didn’t notice and maybe still don’t. He brought the story down to a human level, dispensing with the cliché archetypes of princes, kings, and evil sorcerers. Reading his stuff was like reading Vietnam War fiction on peyote.

If I kiss you now, I won't be able to stop.