Fiction Quotes - Page 43

Confession is good for the soul even after the soul has been claimed” (p. 381).

When dancing with a pit bull, it's always best to let him lead.

The Butcher of Babylon featured in over 500 porn films between 1974 and 1982, and was best known for his motto: Come for the butcher, stay for the meat.

The woman turns away; one wing blackens like an onyx gem while the other glows white like a bright spotlight. She flies into the sky, leaving the crowd staring in astonishment. Angels fly away in two directions. Half make a black storm of moving, twisting shapes. The other half forms a white-as-snow moving cloud. The ranks are divided.

The only way that you can identify and then fulfill your life’s purpose is for you to love yourself, charge up your life and serve the world.

Everything seemed so unreal—so supernatural—and I had to remind myself that is was. We weren’t human. We never were. (Jessica)

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

I know you, Ruth Ann Carver. I know you better than you know yourself. You think you do things right. You think you're a paragon of right living. This is a self-told lie, one bolstered by your coddling parents and grandparents.

But I couldn't help myself, couldn't help the way I felt as I recalled the bliss and rush of a vampire's bite.

Jane woke, stretched, and decided to kill herself. If she hadn’t found a reason to live by the end of the day she would jump from the rig. It felt good to have a plan.

I think the best fiction is about the absolute irrepressibility of love in the face of every circumstance to the contrary. Even in someone as dark, on the face of it, as Faulkner often is, there is that unquenchable glimmer...."Grace will ever find a way." I don't think fiction has to be hokey, or end up hitting you on the head with positivity, to be life affirming. I think all we have to do is go on down to the bottom of the truth and hang out there in the dark for a bit, with nowhere to go but up, and grace will find a way.

As Zhao ducked, he sneaked a blow aimed at Homwe’s stomach. Homwe groaned in surprise and confusion – shocked at his opponent’s speed and strength. He quickly drew a handgun from under his jacket and hit Xi Zhao on the head, drawing blood from his skull.

I find the title How to Be Good. Curious, I open it up. I'm disappointed to find it's fiction.

And then I knew that despite all the pain and hard work all of us had gone through, despite the sadness and anger we felt, in the end, everything was going to be fine.tBut I did not know when the end was, or if it was even near.tBut that did not matter.tI preferred to look towards it in anticipation rather than worry about it. One new day equalled to one new adventure. And right now, I still had plenty of days left in my life. So I did not decide to sit down and plan out my life.tInstead, I decided to sit back, relax, and see where life would take me.

Katherine of Aragon was speaking out for the women of the country, for the good wives who should not be put aside just because their husbands had taken a fancy to another, for the women who walked the hard road between kitchen, bedroom, church and childbirth. For the women who deserved more than their husband's whim.

The sea is rushing in now as unconsciousness does.I can see a chord, hear gospel songs as we hoist the sails.The sails are a soft white bird. We are airborne. We are primitive.

For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.

Women create an idealized, hopeful vision for the future to inspire other women. Fiction and fantasy are the crucial first steps to changing the world.

Plan B?' Ivy said. 'What is plan B?'Jenks reddened. 'Grab the fish and run like hell,' he muttered, and I almost giggled.

Danilo's was the kind of place where many drinking men come to hide, be it from their wives, in-laws, their jobs or life in general. it was where men and women can come to drink poison as if it was the only form of medicine available to remedy the migraine headache called life. The lighting dim and secluded, mostly covering the tables, counters and the door to the bathroom. The walls were decorated in decades of memories, favorite sports teams and other miscellaneous decor that was typical of small bars such as this one. It was too dark to tell what they were from a distance. There was a thick layer of smoke hovering in the air around the ceiling lights, the place was smothered in it but was strongest above everyone's heads. The smell was the classic stale bar odor of cigarettes and cheap cigars.

Wawashkeshthese apples arefor you,red on the whitesnow,their cider tangwill find youin the gray woods.There is a storyhow a snakeoffered an apple,so sweet, so cold,those bite wassorrow.--excerpt from Eric Gadzinski's poem "Wawashkeshgiwis" from The Way North

These scars that we have... they don't go away. They only fade with time, but they're still hauntingly there.

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

And at that moment the alligators burst into the room.

We're only as good as our word.

Few humans see fairies or hear their music, but many find fairy rings of dark grass, scattered with toadstools, left by their dancing feet.

The truth is, time marches on and you have two choices: You move forward, come what may, and you experience all the sour and sweet things that fly at you from around corners, or you sit still. Don't sit still.

When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.

I was hoping against hope he'd refill his Prozac so we could be in love again, but, sadly, that never happened.

Remember this one thing baby girl, women don’t juggle…we diversify!

If one were to reply that those who compose these books write them as fictions, and therefore are not obliged to consider the fine points of truth, I should respond that the more truthful the fiction, the better it is, and the more probable and possible, the more pleasing. Fictional tales must engage the minds of those who read them, and by restraining exaggeration and moderating impossibility, they enthrall the spirit and thereby astonish, captivate, delight, and entertain, allowing wonder and joy to move together at the same pace; none of these things can be accomplished by fleeing verisimilitude and mimesis, which together constitute perfection in writing.

Her anger, so useful just moments before, was getting the better of her now. She could hear it; she was too loud. Nira had counseled her again and again on the importance of holding her tongue and her peace. Ironic, given the source, but good advice all the same.

The day the earth-moving machines arrived, it was as if aliens had invaded Earth. Overnight they appeared, diggers with huge scoops, plodding their slow and ancient ways across the landscape. By the next week they had multiplied and evolved into diverse forms—cranes with long arms, bulldozers and levellers, an assortment of lorries. All day they worked towards some unseen design, creating and removing debris, their latticework of tracks remaking and writing over the space. Untenanted and vulnerable, the attap huts offered no resistance.

The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.

Even though we don't admit it, every single one of us aspires to be like somebody, whether they live in the world today, within the bard's lyrics, or on the pages in the Library

Love, doesn't need any stamp of society to prove itself, it just happens

Nashville has always been competitive. My granddaddy called it the Hillbilly Babylon.

Reality can really tax your imagination.

Don't worry I won't embarrass you. I'm just going to check out hisfriends. Maybe his grades and definitely his track record with the ladies.”“Jackson Ryan Taylor, I swear to whatever holy being there maybe thatI will personally rip you a...”“Whoa, calm down. She's violent,” he whispered only for Danny. “Can't Ibe concerned?”“Yes, so long as you keep your mouth shut.”“What?”“Not a word, Jack. I mean it.”“Moira...”“Not a word!”I stormed out of the bathroom and that was the end of thatconversation

You again,” she said, and she did not sound happy.“I know,” the warrior replied with a heartfelt sigh. “You’re so lucky to see me twice in one day. You’re honored by my presence, yada, yada, heard it all before. Let’s just move on, shall we. I don’t handle fawning very well.

Humph! A text message that said, ‘What’s up, sexy?’ You call that setting a mood? Love making takes place long before the bedroom—

In writing there is art - and in art there is craft ...

Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. “Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room.” The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]

Honor is for the living. Dead is dead.

Wainscott, Deepspace Operations Group,’ said the man. ‘Wasn’t here, don’t exist, pleased to meet you.

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

What if happiness was a choice?

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

That was enough dialogue for a few pages - he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.There weren't any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet. The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower. The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thin gray ghosts, in a good cause; the mortality rate was terrible.His train of thought, the story's lifeline, beer-lubricated but no whit impeded, flashed and sputtered and coursed ahead like lightning in a topaz mist, and the loose fingers and hiccuping keys followed as fast as they could. ("The Penny-A-Worder")

That's the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day.

Who wanted to make lemonade from lemons, when you could make perfectly good lemonade grenades?

Ironically, [living in] communities of the like - minded is one of the greatest dangers of today ́s globalized world. And it ́s happening everywhere, among liberals and conservatives, agnostics and believers, the rich and the poor, East and West alike. We tend to form clusters based on similarity, and then we produce stereotypes about other clusters of people. In my opinion, one way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.

This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy.

I'm a writer. I write checks. Mostly fiction.

Skathis might have been an artist, but he'd been a vile one. Strange the dreamer was an artist, too, and he was the antidote to vile.

The one thing is fiction in a novel and the other thing is reality. With fiction you don't make a fuss - you can 'beat it' and there's never enough. At least in my opinion - cause there are people, who complain about style intensity in literature: they prefer cereals with milk than abyssinian bitches roasted alive on bringhausers and watered with ya-yoo juice.

They placed their bets with such self righteous bravado, but I’m the one who lost.

His blue eyes slice through me and make me wish I hadn't come.

During the Japanese invasion, bombs had fallen from the sky and people could run for cover. Now, they exploded in the middle of the road, or in the fields while people were playing soccer.