Quotes by Novelists - Page 11

Nor do I want the woman that I’m married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not.

Richard Russo

To knock a thing down especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight to the blood.

George Santayana

It seems we need someone to know us as we are--with all we have done--and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please. ...for...others it seems there must be a person to redeem us to ourselves. It isn't enough, apparently, to know oneself. To forgive oneself in secret.

Sue Miller

God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.

Walter de la Mare

... a man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn't have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing.

Pico Iyer

We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten

Cesare Pavese

Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started.

Honoré de Balzac

Why does shame and self-loathing become cruelty to the innocent ?

Anne Rice

Tut, tut. We can't let mere sentiment intrude. This is Science.

K.W. Jeter

In return for their faithful service, they would receive Red Army food rations, which amounted to a generous ladle, twice daily, from a cauldron into which all appropriated food was thrown. The stew boiled twenty-four hours a day, a fatty broth of onions, roosters, rabbits, dead horse, turnips - whatever they happened on in the course of their collecting forays - the Red Army essentially lived off the countryside.

Alan Furst

I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.”-In the yellow time of pollen

Luke Davies

Read in oreder to live

Gustave Flaubert

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

Gustave Flaubert

You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.

Hilary Mantel

I am that which unloves me and loves; I am stricken, and I am the blow.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Let us at least say of religion that it means that every part of the body is infused with mind, not that the mind is overwhelmed and drowned in body. For the principal attribute of the Gods, without or within us, is mind.

Thornton Wilder

Good morning, daddy!Ain't you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred?Listen closely:You'll hear their feetBeating out and beating out a -You thinkIt's a happy beat?Listen to it closely:Ain't you heardsomething underneathlike a -What did I say?Sure,I'm happy!Take it away!Dream BoogieHey, pop!Re-bop!Mop!Y-e-a-h!

Langston Hughes

I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn't like feeling like that.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.

Shirley Jackson

But one gets tired of everything, even of abusing a person. Paris abandons its puppets which it raises to the throne as quickly as it does its martyrs whom it hoists on the gibbet; in its perpetual hunger for new playthings, it never gets itself excited overly much before the statues of its heroes or at the sight of the blood of its victims.

Octave Mirbeau

We are governed not by armies but by ideas.

Mona Caird

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

W Somerset Maugham

…he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone - riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria - even dancing, she danced alone - and it was the aloneness that filled him with love. He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and looked away. And how, later, when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin’s eyes, just flat and uninvolved.

Tim O'Brien

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

Howard Nemerov

None of these things bothered us excessively; we have always been a family that carries bewilderment like a banner, and odd new confusions do not actually seem to be any more bewildering than the ones we invent for ourselves; moreover, in each of these cases it was easier to believe that nothing had happened, or that it was of no importance anyway.

Shirley Jackson

We'll teach it that the humblest insect measuring out its miserable days by the pug-wuggery and skull duggery of the old Slug of Time is worth far more than this defecating bubble!

John Cowper Powys

But once I could look back on it in a calmer frame of mind, it struck me that his motive was surely not so simple and straightforward. Had it resulted from a fatal collision between reality and ideals? Perhaps—but this was still not quite it. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was not the same unbearable loneliness that I now felt that had brought K to his decision.

Sōseki Natsume

-No, not it...I mean...what makes things break up like they do?-Piggy rubbed his glasses slowly and thought. When he understood how Ralph had gone towards accepting him he flushed pinkly with pride.-I donnot, Ralph. I expect it's him.--Jack?--Jack- A taboo was evolving round that word too.

William Golding

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Russell Hoban

However hard he tried, he could never manage to make himself visible to human eyes and not because he can't, since for him nothing is impossible, it's simply that he wouldn't know what face to wear when introducing himself to the beings he supposedly created and who probably wouldn't recognize him anyway. There are those who say we're very fortunate that god chooses not to appear before us, because compared with the shock we would get were such a thing to happen, our fear of death would be mere child's play. Besides, all the many things that have been said about god and about death are nothing but stories, and this is just another one.

José Saramago

Lord, thank you for the people who care more about me than about their schedules.

Shirley Corder

Great services are not canceled by one act or by one single error.

Benjamin Disraeli

You could have done something with newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we'd been wise enough.

Nevil Shute

The rhythm of breath may have been our first language.

Daryl Gregory

I think, therefore I'll think.

Ayn Rand

I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart’s blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

W Somerset Maugham

Humour is an affirmation of dignity a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

Romain Gary

He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.

Gabriel García Márquez

The devil sought to destroy me and discredit my testimony. But God wanted me where I would testify to others about his saving power.

Shirley Corder

To jealousy nothing is more frightful than laughter.

Françoise Sagan

Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.--"Wanda

Ouida

As if one's capacity for pain had anything to do with life's apportionment of agonies, Mr. Kimmelbrod thought. Such idiocy.

Ayelet Waldman

When trouble comes, close ranks

Jean Rhys

You can write the most detailed, vivid description of an ax entering a skull, and nobody will say a word in protest. But if you write a similarly detailed description of a penis entering a vagina, you get letters from people saying they'll never read you again. What the hell? Penises entering vaginas bring a lot more joy into the world than axes entering skulls.

George R.R. Martin

I have often thought that Walter Mitty had it in him to be more than a hen-pecked loser. Instead of living it up as a flamboyant daredevil in his dreams, he could have chosen to be a responsible man in real life, going about his work with dignity, and people may just have treated him with respect. Did his failures in life lead him to seek solace in daydreams or did his wandering mind stand in the way of his potential success? One must have triggered the other, and then it would have been both working together. An empty life drives you to fantasies of fulfilment, which then form a deadly, vicious circle which can turn you into a cartoon, as it did poor Mitty. Or lead you to ruin like Madame Bovary.

Indu Muralidharan

No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.

Anthony Trollope

Then he remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife; he, too, had been very happy the day when he had taken her from her father to his home, and had carried her off on a pillion, trotting through the snow, for it was near Christmas-time, and the country was all white. She held him by one arm, her basket hanging from the other; the wind blew the long lace of her Cauchois headdress so that it sometimes flapped across his mouth, and when he turned his head he saw near him, on his shoulder, her little rosy face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands she put them from time to time in his breast. How long ago it all was! Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road.

Gustave Flaubert

Traps!" he said. "Never in the world! Don't think it! Why, Gower is just a necessary olf bore. Nobody's supposed to know much about him--except instructors and their hapless students.

Henry Blake Fuller

You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.

Ayn Rand

Even silence tends to scream in a strained relationship.

Shivam Ralli

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I lived willy-nilly. Without any sense of being part of the order of things. I lived by fragments, pieces, scraps, in the moment, at random, from incident to incident, as if buffeted by ebb and flow. Oftentimes I had the impression that someone had torn the majority of pages out of the book of my life, because they were empty, or because they belonged not to me but to someone else’s life.

Wiesław Myśliwski

Still, how I nearly felt. In the midst of all that looking.

David Markson

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.

Benjamin Disraeli

Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!

Honoré de Balzac

Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought--and more reading.

Jasper Fforde

When they see us dance. When they see how you look at me. When they see how I smile at you.

Philippa Gregory

When you think about new-born babies being killed in our own lifetime,' he said, 'all the efforts of culture seem worthless. What have people learned from all our Goethes and Bachs? To kill babies?

Vasily Grossman

The County Jail looked like a tall, forbidding elementary school. Seven stories of dirty brown brick, one hundred years old and now operating at 330 percent of capacity.

Richard Price

You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.

Anne Roiphe

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