Fiction Quotes - Page 42

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass … by which I could give them the means to read within themselves.

As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious — weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.”“Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!”“You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again.

Writing a novel is agony.

our destinies are intertwinedlike the stems of ivy on an oak tree.

I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment

Philippe to his mother "do stop chasing after a carriage that has a runaway mare.

We need to talk," he insisted, opening the door to his jeep that was parked next to my car. I was still holding out hope this would end and I would see his smile soon. "What's wrong?" I retaliated before I go in. "There's something you need to know, something I haven't told you," he said, taking my backpack from me.

Storylines from fiction always seem inherently improbable to occur in real life, yet when we read them we are happy to suspend our disbelief, which may simply suggest that in our everyday lives we have an irrational craving for certainty and probability.

And it's hard to hate someone once you understand them.

There's what's smart and what's right." - Molly in the Night Gardener

Freydolf worried that the stone might have been [stolen], but he finally found it safe and sound in one of the many drawers that were better for losing things than organizing them.

...but the air's flat and stale and the people half-hearted. There's nothing to do there. You can make love without trouble or meaning, or get mildly drunk, or extract second-hand emotions from the cinema, or put your mind to sleep on a dance-floor, or play bridge, or throw yourself in front of a train on the Underground. There are forty ways of escaping from consciousness. But I want something more exciting than that.

It was as though everything that mattered was encapsulated in that last moment of my blissful state of oblivion.

An important feature of good characterization in a novel is that the characters are dimensionalized and are not all of one piece. Human beings, as Singer noted, have contradictions.

A STORY NEVER TOLD BEFORE

All you need do, Bernie,”she gulped her toast soaked in coffee, “is present the truth as fiction.

I’m a reader who uses fiction as a way of worrying about life.

Well, here we are."Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

With the threat of them being potential spies or saboteurs, nobody will argue against our actions, and history itself will vindicate us.

What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

Tangled Moon ~ Sometimes you have to break the rules. Sometimes you have to let go of the past. And sometimes you have to accept the impossible.

Racism is a virus which can only be spread by us!

To be honest with you, I don't have the words to make you feel better, but I do have the arms to give you a hug, ears to listen to whatever you want to talk about, and I have a heart; a heart that's aching to see you smile again.lines from Love Vs Destiny...

At my age, every day that I overcome simple inertia is a victory.

The story was heavy in her hands, the book spread open like legs, the letters very small i spite of describing such a big moment

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

Did I love her? No. I obsessed over her completely. And thank heavens I was obsessed. Obsession, infatuation, is something short-lived. A sweet fever dream that leaves you exhausted from the high. Love is perpetual. Love is an entire world compared to that other form of mania people mistake love for. If love is loving the reality of a person, obsession is idealising the fantasy of another. Did I love her? No. Never. But I was utterly obsessed.

Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.

My most educated analysis, with all means of science and technology in mind, is that it’s magic,” Alex said. “There’s no other possible explanation!” -Alex Bailey, The Land of Stories; The Wishing Spell

There is no man but carries in his breast the makings of a story, which, though never told, comes more home to him, than any the mind of another man can find and fashion in words("The Watcher O' The Dead")

Annoyed?” said Sophie. “Why should I be annoyed? Someone only filled the castle with rotten aspic, and deafened everyone in Porthaven, and scared Calcifer to a cinder, and broke a few hundred hearts. Why should that annoy me?

Treat backstory like a pungent spice. I say this to encourage you to picture a jalapeno pepper that can set your mouth on fire, every time you even think about adding backstory into your book. What you need is subtlety.

You look within and upon and around me, savoring every inch. You pull my ear for no reason, and I can tell you really don’t want to cry. As a tear falls between by breasts, I look away and pretend the grass is a jungle, and the ants, little kings of forgotten tribes.

Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

We all have the best laid plans for our children, and they go and ruin it all by growing up any way they want to. What the hell was it all for, then? (Real Life and Liars)

Fiction isn't what 'was'. It's 'what if'?

Love is the connection between souls synchronized through heart beats. Quote from my upcoming book 'Always Be MINE

Mary approaches her before she is able to reach her station. "Hello Lily. Get anything special for Christmas?""Just the usual." She answers. "Shattered dreams.

I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many ‘culturally-mandated’ differences. In First World countries we’ve evolved beyond mere biology -it isn’t the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.

I can't go on, I'll go on.

I know this is what God made me … He wanted me to be a gay man so he could have this experience with me. In my spirit, in my soul…this is why he made me…so that he could experience it with me from the clay, to the sparkling dust of spirit that is also me, flowing into heaven.

His cell-phone rang. Dominic fumbled for it on the nightstand next to the couch, the dim lights not helping his endeavour. He had piercing, generic, banal fluorescent lights on his face all the time at work and at University, it was so bad it made him loathe even natural sunlight. Lucky this apartment’s living room light had a dimmer. He flipped open his phone and said hello. ‘Hey Dom, how you doin’?’ a voice boomed. It was Ben. They proceeded to talk about the upcoming exams, which were deceptively close as it was week 10 at the moment. Yes, they would be alright. Yes, they would meet up afterwards. No, he hadn’t studied more than Ben had. As he clapped the phone closed after the genial conversation reached its natural nadir, he had forgotten most of what had been said

Almost all heroism is designed to make you inert by placing it in a context that you can't possibly act on.

All the real secrets are buried, and only ghosts speak the truth.

Before I fix the world, I have to fix myself.

She was going to go home after this and sip red wine and stare at the wall, I could tell. She would wonder why she was doing this, struggling against commercial interests at a corporate hospital when all she wanted to do was help people, and in the morning, when she walked out of her beautiful home and unlocked her convertible, she would remember.

Reading takes the reader to faraway lands, new cultures, new and exciting adventures; you meet new friends and enemies; it takes the reader from the heights of the imagination to the depths of human emotions; all without taking a single step.

...one had to expect very little—almost nothing—from life, Aaron knew, one had to be grateful, not always trying to seize the days like some maniac of living, but to give oneself up, be seized by the days, the months and years, be taken up in the froth of sun and moon, some pale and smoothie-ed river-cloud of life, a long, drawn-out, gray sort of enlightenment, so that when it was time to die, one did not scream swear words and knock things down, did not make a scene, but went easily with understanding and tact, and quietly, in a lightly pummeled way, having been consoled–having allowed to be consoled–by the soft, generous, worthlessness of it all, having allowed to be massaged by the daily beating of life, instead of just beaten.

If I'd had enough breath, I would have screamed, both at the sensation and at the sheer pettiness of the bastard who wouldn't allow me even a tiny chance of escape.

I am going to show you great and mighty things which no one has ever seen before.... I am going to take you places where no one has ever been. I am going to take you to heights where no one has ever reached. If you will only come to me with all your heart, I will do a mighty work in you, which no man can undo but yourself.

Nanny Ogg was an attractive lady, which is not the same as being beautiful. She fascinated Casanunda. She was an incredibly comfortable person to be around, partly because she had a mind so broad it could accommodate three football fields and a bowling alley.

… Shannon’s fingers itched to smash the man in the face. Inside his head he kept telling himself, Keep cool, baby, absolutely cool.

I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.

Fiction may amuse us, but reality instills lessons to be imbibed through experience; to 'live' this stark reality called 'life' as a blessing, whereas some foolishly waste it by following fiction and fictitious characters.

The problem lies not with genre but with formula, which consists of seeing genre conventions as restrictions rather than mere guidelines, ends in themselves rather than possibilities.

Am I your weakness?""Of course you are.

great literature is literature that speaks to deep, fundamental human truths and experience in a way that is relatable to the reader and that may provoke engagement or facilitate insight into these truths and experiences. If these truths and experiences are about breaches of the normal, then surely horror has a place in literature, and in facts may proffer deep engagement with the most profound aspects of our existence. Sometimes only horror can say what needs to be said.