Fiction Quotes - Page 5

Surely, she was too young to have so many ghosts.

When you confidently defend fiction, think about reality also

(M)ysteries in fiction are seldom as insoluble as those in life, as most writers can't resist the lure of omniscience.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

There is truth in stories. There is truth in one of your paintings, boy, or in a sunset or a couplet from Homer. Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact. If you believe only facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.

A smart person is not one that knows the answers, but one who knows where to find them...

My name's Sean, Jem. I'm Sean.

We live in a society that doesn’t offer any support or appreciation for ventures that aren’t clearly articulated and aligned for a goal. A writer gets past this. It’s going to be a mess before you’re finished, and you may not have a name for the mess or understand its utilitarian purposes. There aren't words for everything. For now, we’ll call it the draft of a story.

What is it that frightens us about a "novel of causes", and conversely, does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? Can it not politically and temporally specific and still be in good literary taste? We are leery of literature that smacks of the polemic, instructional, or prescriptive, and I guess rightly so--it's a drag to be lectured to--but what does that imply about our attitudes towards intellectual inquiry? While I enjoy reading kitchen-table novels in which characters are distilled to their emotional essence and their lives stripped of politics and commerce, it simply is not reflective of my experience. I see our lives as being a part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman's fallopian tube. This is the resonance I want to conjure in my books.I want to write novels that engage the emotions and the intellect, and that means going head to head with the chaos of evils and issues that threaten to overpower us all. And if they threaten to overpower the characters, then I have to make the characters stronger.

On the misty window of her room, she let her finger trace a broken line. She was that line.

It’s okay to dress up like another person, but never try to be someone else. Just try to be yourself, because that’s what makes you special. Oh, and watch out if a dragon ever starts to dance ballet.

You know, one of the interesting things you find about writing fiction is that any fiction you write has to be political. Otherwise, it goes into the realm of fantasy. So like, if you write about a woman in America in 1910, if you don’t write that she can’t really control her property, that she can’t—doesn’t have any say over her children, that she can’t vote—if you don’t put that in it, then it’s a fantasy. Like, well, how is her life informed? That’s true about everybody. If you write about black people, you write about white men, I mean, it has to be political. A lot of people don’t realize that, it seems.

For me, at least, fiction is the only way i can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

Like all fiction, my lies are just my efforts to be truer than the truth.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

I think I found your vampire,” Andrew said, except this time he wasn’t so amused.However, Gabriella was, her smile huge as she laughed, the sound a trill in the densely packed cold air.“You think this is funny?” The words came out surly, but Andrew couldn’t stop his lips from twitching over her amusement.“I thought they’d be bigger,” she said, stifling another round of giggles. “Are you okay?”“Just a flesh wound.

Grandfather recently died. He died alone on a trip away from home in a town where no one expected him to be

a true leader must be able to command with an iron fist, not just a humble heart.

It goes in streaks. But some things never go out of fashion.' Hunger artists, fat folks, giants, and dog acts come and go but real freaks never lose their appeal.

To annoy or piss off are light offences. I'd say if you abuse the goodness of a novelist or a writer, the truth is, he or she can kill you multiple times or cannibalise you in many antagonist characters.

Was she happy? She thought – yes, reasonably so. Then again, what was happiness but the vast terrain between ecstasy and agony? Was this too small an ambition?

It was the afternoon in the city of Orlando, Florida. Amid the hustle and bustle, the cafe next door to a strip mall played popular music out loud. Children and families with familiar cartoon characters on their shirts and hats walked past; vacationers took pictures of the palm trees and the ducks passing by, shouting, "Look! Florida ducks!

To embellish reality with makeup, with silk and royal purple, isn’t that what we all should be doing? Beneath the life we live every day the silk and the purple are hiding, waiting for us. A person just has to dare to throw off his everyday clothes, to rip them off and to put on the silk and purple that exist, I know it. But we’re the ones who cover them up. Out of boredom, indifference, fear. Mostly fear. So right from the first moment I met you, my lies were always the truth: in telling them I unveiled the world for you — the hidden world, the true world. You were really the one who lied. You wanted everything to remain untouched, paradise to be paradise, and me angel. But you made a fatal mistake: you never believed me. You never understood why I lied, that through my lies I was giving you a unique gift: the truth. You always tried to control me — out of love, of course. But is there any word more ambiguous than the word “love”?

The writer's characters must stand before us with a wonderful clarity, such continuous clarity that nothing they do strikes us as improbable behavior for just that character, even when the character's action is, as sometimes happens, something that came as a surprise to the writer himself. We must understand, and the writer before us must understand, more than we know about the character; otherwise neither the writer nor the reader after him could feel confident of the character's behavior when the character acts freely.

You had this all planned, didn’t you?' I accused. 'Thought you could come in here and seduce me like you do everyone else?' It wasn’t as if I could be angry, lying atop him as I was, but I tried.

What was justice, after all, but a particular outcome?

I wish this world had none of it. That we were all bound only by the matter around us and the dreams in our hearts. But it does, and we are all slave to it, unless we give the challenge. What is the point of possessing the power you have if not to use it for the greatest good you hold so dear? And why do you think that goodness exists in doing nothing, rather than trying something you’re uncertain of?

But wishes are only granted in fairy tales.

The shadowy edge between normal and paranormal is more than ILLUSORY...

there were worse things than feeling guilty, like feeling dead.

Tell you what, you let me go, and I’ll ask you plenty of questions about your race. Until then, I’m slightly distracted with how this little vacation on the good ship Holy Sh*t is going to pan out for me.

He didn't remember ever being less weird than he was right now. In fact, as far as he could tell he had always been more or less exactly as weird as this. if not more so.

People have incredible nerve to do terrible things, but never actually admit to them.

What?

Everything we know and believe about deity and divinity nowadays, is a direct origin of old civilizations. Everybody, Greeks, Saxons, Assyrians and Soumerians, all imitate the ancient ways of the first tribes of central Africa (Mason father to his son in "The Omniconstant

I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.

And what was I if not death's ghostwriter?

Everyone writes the book he or she loves to read. Great authors write the books others love to read.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives

Everyone says you only fall in love once, but that not true, because every time I see you, I fall in love all over again

His right ear still held both studs, and I wondered who had the missing earring. I would have asked, but was afraid he’d tell me Ivy had it.

She knew this day was different and worse, much worse than before. This was the day that Bethany began to believe their lies. And not only did she believe them, she silently repeated them, causing more damage to her soul and spirit than anyone else on earth could have ever done to her.

One of the tribes of Lisser, Kisera, has a saying. "Tra ulea keyē milyenura keyē gryētu - you only live on through that which you leave." You have to leave something for others to remember.' She gazed at his solemn face, pulling the cord of her cloak open, grasping half the heavy material and launching it over his shoulders. He pulled it further until in encompassed them both. Then she did something both of them were surprised at - she slid her hand into his. ‘And you will.

I have to save the world tomorrow, and I don't even know what I'm going to wear yet.--Rachel Morgan

Oh you're one of those people are you? The people who ask God for something and when they get it, they tell God to forget about answering that particular prayer because it's just happened. That's one of my pet hates, I'm sorry.

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.

Stephen King once wrote, “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why - but there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end.

She's dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.

Raven shook her head more violently and opened her mouth, a loud shriek filled the room and Amari realised what was about to happen, she ducked down and wrapped her arms around her head, just as the mirror shattered over her

It is amazing how sharing of one’s intimate details can make human beings forget the formality of a relationship and bring them closer together.

The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.

Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out.

Her eyes were a rich dark brown that were so deep, they reminded me of my sleepless nights, awake, staring into complete darkness. I felt compelled to look deeper, searching for something inside her, but her soul was covered and her eyes would not show me.

A few of the gunslingers dance, but only a few. And they were the young ones. The other ones only sat, and it seemed to me they were half embarrassed in all that light, that civilized light.

Writing is just building a new world – one character, one place, one maniac at a time.

Justice will prevail!

Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking.

My new story collection won’t please everyone, nor was it meant to. Then again, not everybody lives in my world. If they did, I’d have to move out and find another world to write about.

I'd heard of Evergreen Care Center before. Cass and I had always made fun of the stupid ads they ran on TV, featuring some dragged-out woman with a limp perm and big, painted-on circles under her eyes, downing vodka and sobbing uncontrollably. "We can't heal you at Evergreen", the very somber voiceover said. "But we can help you to heal yourself." It had become our own running joke, applicable to almost anything. "Hey Cass, "I'd say, "hand me that toothpaste." "Caitlin," she'd say, her voice dark and serious. "I can't hand you the toothpaste. But I CAN help you hand the toothpaste to yourself.