Quotes by Novelists - Page 12

If it comes to that," retorted Frederica, with spirit, " I am continually shocked by the things you don't scruple to say to me,cousin! You are quite abominable!"He sighed. "Alas, I know it! The reflection gives me sleepless nights.

Georgette Heyer

When he talked his eyes went away from mine and then he forced himself to look straight at me and he began to explain and I knew that he felt very strange with me and that he hated me, and it was funny sitting there and talking like that, knowing he hated me.

Jean Rhys

But in those solitary Masses they began to be aware that once again they were mistresses of their fate, after having renounced not only their family name but their own identity in exchange for a security that was no more than another of a bride's many illusions. They alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved to distraction, who perhaps loved them but whom they had to continue nurturing until his last breath as if he were a child, suckling him, changing his soiled diapers, distracting him with a mother's tricks to ease his terror at going out each morning to face reality. And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. (4.113)

Gabriel García Márquez

The proper, wise balancingof one's whole life may depend upon thefeasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.

Arnold Bennett

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.

George Sand

To tell the truth, girls are no longer the way they used to be. They play gangsters, nowadays, just like boys. They organize rackets. They plan holdups and practice karate. They will rape defenseless adolescents. They wear pants... Life has become impossible.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!

Jasper Fforde

We believe that to govern perfectly it is necessary to avoid governing too much.

James Hilton

You don't even care enough about us to hate us, do you?

William Golding

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

Ayn Rand

Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.

W Somerset Maugham

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.

W Somerset Maugham

Duty eats free will for breakfast.

Daryl Gregory

If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.

Gabriel García Márquez

Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.

George R.R. Martin

Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.

George R.R. Martin

Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus and it’s hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy and more than anything in the world you want to get off and the only reason in the world you don’t get off is it’s still fifty blocks from where you’re going? Well, I can get off right now if I want to, because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it’s the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. As soon as I’ve had enough, it’s my stop. I’ve had enough.

Marsha Norman

Beauty is an ecstacy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.

W Somerset Maugham

A small spoon of victory is just the thing to settle the stomach before battle, " Ser Imry had declared happily.

George R.R. Martin

No love no friendship can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.

François Mauriac

And then there are always clever people about to promise you that everything will be all right if only you put yourself out a bit... And you get carried away, you suffer so much from the things that exist that you ask for what can't ever exist. Now look at me, I was well away dreaming like a fool and seeing visions of a nice friendly life on good terms with everybody, and off I went, up into the clouds. And when you fall back into the mud it hurts a lot. No! None of it was true, none of those things we thought we could see existed at all. All that was really there was still more misery-- oh yes! as much of that as you like-- and bullets into the bargain!

Émile Zola

It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis a purging of pity and terror, Which Aristotle tells is the object of art. Everything is transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can overcome it. Everything is grist to his mill. ... The artist is the only free man.

W Somerset Maugham

Life is warmth and warmth is fire, and fire is God's and God's alone.

George R.R. Martin

Some men are like swords, made for fighting. Hang them and they go to rust.

George R.R. Martin

If I had received good instruction as a child I would be with my family today and at peace with my neighbors. I hope and pray that all you parents in the sound of my voice will train up your children in the way they should go.

Charles Portis

Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness.

George Sand

This showed once again that everyone had something different to lose in this battle. Some were concerned for their lives, and some for those they cared most about: rays, sea horses, even the chickens that ran free in the streets of the city because they couldn't all be caught in time.

Kai Meyer

I was recalling that other world in which it had thrilled me, in a way, the surprise of thinking that I could be a person who would betray Daniel. Now I wondered if Daniel could surprise himself, could surprise me, by being such a person too. Would he let himself do such a thing? I didn’t think so. And then I wondered: Is it by will, then, that we are who we are? Do we decide, do we make ourselves, after a certain point in life?I tried to call up the moment when I had decided I could be such a person. It seemed to me I hadn’t quite got there, not really. That I was still just playing with the idea of it when the ground shifted under me. But perhaps to play with such an idea was already to be a certain kind of person.

Sue Miller

Roger edged past the chief, only just avoiding pushing him with his shoulder. The yelling ceased, and Samneric lay looking up in quiet terror. Roger advanced upon them as one wielding a nameless authority.

William Golding

In the many months of his absence, she never wondered whether he was true to her or not; she knew he was. She knew, even though she was too young to know the reason, that indiscriminate desire and unselective indulgence were possible only to those who regarded sex and themselves as evil.

Ayn Rand

Bach felt the beauty and sadness of the moment. These men who defied the power of the Russian heavy artillery, these coarse, hardened soldiers who were dispirited by their lack of ammunition and tormented by vermin and hunger had all understood at once that what they needed more than anything in the world was not bread, not bandages, not ammunition, but these tiny branches twined with useless tinsel, these orphanage toys.

Vasily Grossman

They were the sort who berated a man for meddling and chased him away, then berated him again for not being there when he was needed. Not that they would admit he was needed, even then, not them. Raise a hand to help and you were interfering, do nothing and you were an un-trustworthy wastrel.

Robert Jordan

If any has a stone to throw It is not I ever or now.

Elinor Wylie

Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source the precondition of his productive work - pride is the result.

Ayn Rand

In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accreations of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering, shunted aside by time's next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman's mutterings from a snare in the web of the world.

William Gay

You may make love in dancing as well as sitting.

Aphra Behn

The condition of women in a nation is the real measure of its progress.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Another one of your quippy japes?

Jasper Fforde

An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice.

Romain Gary

Yes, but I say that Nature is our enemy, that we must always fight against Nature, for she is continually bringing us back to an animal state. You may be sure that God has not put anything on this earth that is clean, pretty, elegant or accessory to our ideal; the human brain has done it.

Guy de Maupassant

He doesn't mind if he dies... indeed, he would like to die; but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep; but not at the price of falling to it.

William Golding

...the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve.

John Irving

Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that," Himiko said, elaborating her friend's terrific prophecy; " You won't get a divorce Bird. You'll justify yourself like crazy, and try to salvage your married life by confusing the real issues. A decision like divorce is beyond you now, Bird, the poison has gone to work. And you know how the story ends ? Not even your own wife will trust you absolutely, and one day you'll discover for yourself that your entire private life is in the shadow of deception and in the end you'll destroy yourself. Bird, the first signs of self-destruction have appeared already!" " But that's a blind alley! Leave it to you to paint the most hopeless future you can think of. " Bird lunged at jocularity...

Kenzaburō Ōe

And what if we’d been utterly open? Made jokes about the first wife? What if we’d been that kind of family? Well, I would have been different, surely. But not because I knew the secret. For it wasn’t the secret—the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway—that led to the austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets. That became lies.

Sue Miller

If you're gonna be stupid you gotta be tough.

John Grisham

Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.

Gabriel García Márquez

Damn your principles! Stick to your party!

Benjamin Disraeli

An answer is always a form of death.

John Fowles

I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of "coffee shops" as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.

Edmund White

Like the pain of a bad wound, the effect of a deep shock takes some while to be felt. When a child is told, for the first time in his life, that a person he has known is dead, although he does not disbelieve it, he may well fail to comprehend it and later ask--perhaps more than once--where the dead person is and when he is coming back.

Richard Adams

It all seemed a hollow sham now - that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she'd had enough of that; she wanted to live!

Émile Zola

To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.

Rémy de Gourmont

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you find absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.

Octave Mirbeau

To part with money is a sacrifice beyond almost all men endowed with a sense of order. There is scarcely any man alive who does not think himself meritorious for giving his neighbour five pounds. Thriftless gives, not from a beneficent pleasure in giving, but from a lazy delight in spending. He would not deny himself one enjoyment; not his opera-stall, not his horse, not his dinner, not even the pleasure of giving Lazarus the five pounds.

William Makepeace Thackeray

The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.

Rémy de Gourmont

For this will cure him that is sick, and rouse him that is in dumps; one that has loved, it will remember of it; one that has not, it will instruct. For there was never any yet that wholly could escape love, and never shall there be any, never so long as beauty shall be, never so long as eyes can see. But help me that God to write the passions of others; and while I write, keep me in my own right wits.

Longus

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.

Carlos Fuentes

If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.

Sue Monk Kidd

To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.

Jean Genet

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