Novel Quotes - Page 5

Millions cheer the warriorspilling blood across the ringwhile the one who stands for peaceis ridiculed and shamed.Must hearts forever sufferfrom ignorance and greed?Can bombs heal our soulsor set our spirits free?

Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

The great novels are deterrents. A Merck's manual on how not to live.

Once I was King of the Titans. Now I need a MedicAlert bracelet and a subscription to the Safe Return program. Can you put out a Silver Alert on a god? I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

It was disconcerting that being in love felt lonelier than lonelines.

Humans by nature are promiscuous. Loyalty is an aberration!

How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.

Life is a great novel, discovering your calling is the far better sequel

It’s not that we have to leave this life one day, it's how many things we have to leave all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, wine, summertime, drunkenness, and the physics of falling leaves, clothing, myrrh, perfumed hair, flirting friends, two strangers' glance; the reflection of the moon, with words like, 'Soon' ... 'do you want me?' ... '...to lie enlaced' ... 'and sleep entwined' thinking ahead, with thoughts behind...?' Ô, Why!Why can’t we leave this life slowly?

A fugitive on the run with a plan for the future is the definition of hubris.

Sometimes I think it is my fate to live in the wreckage and confusion of crumbling houses.

‘Eighth one this week,’ he said.

It's like a nesting doll of imagination! It's like a painting of a painting! It's like the wind catching a chill from the wind, or a wave taking a dip in the ocean. It's like reading a novel that merely describes another novel. It's like music tapping its foot to a tune and saying 'Oh! I love this song!

He’d used the amulet to read my thoughts again. I pictured smacking him in the face.

Whatever it was that came over him that night pulled a cord—her laugh, or her surprise gasp slipping out to think he’d do something so bold.

when you walk the path of revenge, know that someone will always follow your trail

He thought, that all men, trickled away, changing constantly, until they finally dissolved, while the artist-created images remained unchangeably the same. He thought that the fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do. Perhaps the woman after whom the master shaped his beautiful Madonna is already wilted or dead, and soon he, too, will be dead; others will live in his house and eat at his table- but his work will still be standing hundreds of years from now, and longer. It will go on shimmering in the quiet cloister church, unchangingly beautiful, forever smiling with the same sad, flowering mouth.

Her calculations have always held the utmost accuracy, but mathematics alone will not be enough to guide her; she must learn to trust in chance and, if need be, in accident.

Sal turned, an eye stalk hanging from his teeth.

Good humour was miles behind a second cup of morning tea. It was too early for nonsense.

But inside loss there can be gain, too,like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose.

Writing consist of everything. whether your writing is of riddles, rimes, prose, trivial, general, of thought, or of feeling. indiscretions you've done or have fantasized about. love, deception, romance, fear, death, life, pain, & yes even happiness. writing is of a specific purpose & states a meaning within what is written.

What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is a virtuous pretext by which man's hatred for man justifies its crimes.

Even if we try to conform to ideals and strive for perfection, we will always be pulled back to our core identity because it’s the path of least resistance for our souls – an energy force that wants nothing more than for us to honor and accept who we are and discover what we’re meant to do in the world.

Low and behold what comes of reading too many romance novels.

I like to think she hates my guts a little less every hour.

Maybe. Just maybe... Lettie smiled. That would do. It might be an impossible plan but it's worth a try.

If the US is a human melting pot, then Eastern Europe is a scrap yard.

I never want a girl to lose all hope that her life can’t completely turn around, even if she feels that she is at the edge, standing on one foot, and ready to say goodbye.

I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.

Vane’s lips tightened to suppress a smile. “Why so hostile, love?”“You whacked me on the head with a ball!”“You deserved it.

Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor’s coat, that folder-up, yellowed page torn from the back of the book, with a bristle of thick, coarse hairs clenced inside. Galina, says my grandfather’s handwriting, above and below a child’s drawing of the tiger, who is curved like the blade of a scimitar across the page. Galina, it says, and that is how I know to find him again, in Galina, in the story he hadn’t told me but perhaps wished he had.

It's terrific, Clare," Henry says, and we stare at each other, and I think, "Don't leave me.

Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces.At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy.Was the last face the real one?No. They were all real: I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn’t know who I was or wanted to be. (I was frightened by the differences between one face and the next; none of them seemed to fit me properly, and I groped my way clumsily among them.)

When he unleashes on her everything falls together. Like a crick in the neck snapped into place, the boy's brain pops and is put right. It is a beautiful undoing, a beautiful becoming. He doesn't stop to think about it when the punches follow her down to the ground. He doesn't stop to notice when she goes still or when the pool of blood under her head pillows out into a great, liquid heart. He doesn't stop until he's pulled off her and he doesn't start to think again until that night, when he's back at home. For hours and hours his brain stays beautifully popped into place.

A novelist's job is almost to be a stupid as possible, except in the cunning moment when you need to structure something, when you need to be very intelligent indeed. The rest of the time, you need almost an empty mind, where you can let any image in, follow it along, and allow an emotional charge, almost the way actors and singers can work. The more instinct you have as a novelist, and the less intelligence, the better.

Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes appeared, followed by impeccably creased matt charcoal pinstriped light woollen legs, followed by the beautifully cut lower hem of a jacket, its black vent revealing a scarlet silk lining, its open front revealing a flat muscular stomach under a finely-striped red and white shirt. Val’s legs followed, in powder-blue stockings and saxe-blue shoes, under the limp hem of a crêpey mustard-coloured dress, printed with blue moony flowers. The four feet advanced and retreated, retreated and advanced, the male feet insisting towards the basement stairs, the female feet resisting, parrying. Roland opened the door and went into the area, fired mostly by what always got him, pure curiosity as to what the top half looked like.

Every book has to wait for the right time to be read and understood.

Suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others.

If you’d saved the girl, you’d be a hero. Next time.

From Flood, Flash, and Pheromones--coming soon:As Cassie’s body hurled toward him in the swirl, she realized the brevity of the situation. This was it. This was the moment that determined whether she lived to see another day or drowned in this filthy brown water. This was the moment she proved she had never been a quitter, never been a weakling. All the problems she’d dealt with at work today seemed trivial.

Time will solve all the problems Chinese school graduates face. In our bilingual society, there are no more Chinese school graduates, only English school graduates who can speak Mandarin. These English school graduates probably can also read and write Chinese, but they did not go to a Chinese school, and they act and think differently from us. Drawing a line between us, they would never say they graduated from a Chinese school, because former Chinese school graduates, that is, the vanishing group of people that includes us, are second-class citizens. They, on the other hand, belong to the first class, the Chinese elite, English school graduates who are fluent in Chinese.

If I am going to be a monster, the least I could do is be well fed!

Looking at the stars is a glimpse of history. Some of the things we see are millions of light-years away. Everything in the universe has a past but stars don't try to hide it. They just keep shinning, for everyone to see.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms...where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.

She didn’t think that by hanging a chandelier from the ceiling you made a room with a chandelier. She felt you’d made another world, which you could slip in and out of by some vague process of application

Pak Karman hugged his wife’s gravestone tightly. “You left without saying farewell!” The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light.

My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.

English. That was where I met him.

She said, 'It is filled with all the words for how I want you.

There are empty spaces that must be respected – those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.

Be quick, but don't hurry.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

The most important thing I came to tell you is that I want your oath that you will keep an open mind...about everything that may seem impossible.

There are times when the unseen can be even more dangerous than what our eyes behold.

Love is not for thrill-seekers, dreamers, or children with short attention spans. And you, son, fit into all three of those categories.

Whatever’s eating at you, let it go. Emotion leads to poor decisions. Poor decisions lead to scrutiny. Scrutiny is our greatest threat.

The novel cannot submit to authority.

You battled monsters. You sweat and cried your way to this one prolific moment where you finally realize that those dark days and sleepless nights were pre-requisites to your becoming.

‘There’s no time for right or wrong,’ I said.