Quotes by Novelists - Page 14

I gaped at what I saw next. She yanked his arm off and ate it. Gross! I knew she was hungry, but that was just...well, against the school rules for one thing.

Imogen Rose

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

Thornton Wilder

People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.

Thornton Wilder

If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

George Santayana

Fantastic fortune thou deceitful light,That cheats the weary traveler by night,Though on a precipice each step you tread,I am resolved to follow where you lead.

Aphra Behn

Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.

Georges Bernanos

She could see now that some of the grime that covered him was blood. He looked to be six or seven years old. His ribs were showing and his belly sunk in towards his spine, leaving a hollow above his hips.

Shirley A. Martin

Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move.

Ayn Rand

My lord father used to say a man should never draw his sword unless he means to use it.

George R.R. Martin

The full-grown modern human being ... is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment... when he is consumed in the service of an idea in the conquest of the goal pursued.

R. Briffault

Time and time again one has seen, even in people not particularly given to reflection, that the best way of finding a solution is to let one’s thoughts drift until the right moment comes to pounce, like a tiger taking its prey by surprise.

José Saramago

They had stopped shouting at each other and put their faith in legal counsel. With the result that how things could be made to look was what counted, not how they actually were.

William Maxwell

Our power comes from the earth

Luis Alberto Urrea

she is an illusion... she can fake everything... you may feel she don't have emotions but may be she is the most emotional one...

shivangi lavaniya

The things I do for love.

George R.R. Martin

My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.

George R.R. Martin

No man can be satisfied with his attainment although he may be satisfied with his circumstances.

Frank Swinnerton

If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste.

William H. Gass

The Sun never sets. It is we who rise think to shine.

Earle Birney

The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.

Sinclair Lewis

Vulnerability is the curse of the thinking classes.

John D. MacDonald

It's a tricky, complex, indifferent society, Puss. It's a loophole world. And there are a lot of clever animals who know how to reach through the loopholes and pick the pockets of the unsuspecting.

John D. MacDonald

Marriage I thinkFor womenIs the best of opiates.It kills the thoughtsThat think about the thoughts,It is the best of opiates.So said Maria.But too long in solitude she'd dwelt,And too long her thoughts had feltTheir strength. So when the man drew near,Out popped her thoughts and covered him with fear.Poor Maria! Better that she had kept her thoughts on a chain,For now she's alone again and all in pain;She sighs for the man that went and the thoughts that stayTo trouble her dreams by night and her dreams by day.

Stevie Smith

One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him.

Thomas Mann

Most of my kin are bastards," [Tyrion] said with a wry smile, "but you're the first I've had to friend.

George R.R. Martin

He drew the dagger and laid it on the table between them; a length of dragonbone and Valyrian steel, as sharp as the difference between right and wrong, between true and false, between life and death.

George R.R. Martin

If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I wish you'd fall in love with me," she said."Why?""Because you're really someone worth falling in love with. And if we were in love, I wouldn't be drifting. I wouldn't be nobody. At least not while I was with you.

Anne Rampling

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true and the opposite is probably equally true.

James T. Farrell

He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realised that right here, on this disco floor, there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy – and all for naught. In a few years they’d all be old walruses, and in a few more, dead.

Edmund White

When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.

W Somerset Maugham

That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.

John Fowles

Slang is language which takes off its coat spits on its hands - and goes to work.

Carl Sandburg

Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for you him and take him as his ward.

Philippa Gregory

Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Nature loves death: she will not punish it.

Guy de Maupassant

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

John Irving

The power to heal the scars begins with hope.

Shilpa Menon

He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, "Do you think I look like a murderer? In your good opinion?"A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, "At this moment, master, I would have to say...

Hilary Mantel

Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.

George Santayana

That K was hesitant in love does not mean that his love was in any sense lukewarm. He was unable to move, despite the violence of his emotion. And since the impact of his new emotion was not so great as to allow him to forget himself, he was forced to look back and remind himself of what his past had meant. And in doing so he could not but continue along the path that he had so far followed.

Sōseki Natsume

if admiration were not generally deemed the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lackey of poverty, the love of gain would cease to be an universal problem.

William Godwin

If a woman is interested in her own struggle into identity and power, then she will be interested in other women. The lives of these, and other women, show me what a woman can do even without formal power, education, or rights, in a world dominated by men. They are inspirational examples of the strength of the female spirit.

Philippa Gregory

DEAR DIARYYou are greater than the BibleAnd the Conference of the BirdsAnd the UpanishadsAll put togetherYou are more severeThan the ScripturesAnd Hammurabi’s CodeMore dangerous than Luther’s paperNailed to the Cathedral doorYou are sweeterThan the Song of SongsMightier by farThan the Epic of GilgameshAnd braverThan the Sagas of IcelandI bow my head in gratitudeTo the ones who give their livesTo keep the secretThe daily secretUnder lock and keyDear DiaryI mean no disrespectBut you are more sublimeThan any Sacred TextSometimes just a listOf my eventsIs holier than the Bill of RightsAnd more intense

Leonard Cohen

I've an insatiable craving inside me that consumes everything and makes me regard the sufferings and joys of others only in their relationship to me, as food to sustain my spiritual powers. I am no longer capable of loosing my head in love, Ambition has been crushed in me by circumstances, but it has come out in another way, for ambition is nothing but a lust for power and my chief delight is to dominate those around me. To inspire in others love, devotion, fear - isn't that the first symptom and the supreme triumph of power? To cause another person suffering or joy, having no right to do so - isn't that the sweetest food of pride?

Mikhail Lermontov

The happy combination of fortuitous circumstances.

Walter Scott

Trying to find answers to why and how my life got into such a dismal mess, I sought answers in the scriptures, in religion and philosophy, but it only confused me further. Stories, on the other hand, helped me cope, heal and recover.

Indu Muralidharan

And that reminds me, Mama! I have just intercepted another of that puppy’s floral offerings to my sister. This billet was attached to it.” (Charles)

Georgette Heyer

Of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the cruelest is the one called love.

George R.R. Martin

Ser Cleos looked like a weasel, fought like a goose, and had the courage of an especially brave ewe.

George R.R. Martin

It is what writers do, imagine and feel the pain of others, sometimes at the expense of feeling their own. Here, then, in these pages is mine, the fear of death, of loss, of unexpressed love. Here is the truth told in a story. And in the telling of it perhaps I have found some way to have courage, to believe.

Niall Williams

Reality is always richer, more unpredictable than our deductions

Leonardo Sciascia

A man's work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, but in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. No one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.

W Somerset Maugham

And please return it. You may think this a strange request, but I find that although my friends are poor arithmeticians, they are nearly all of them good bookkeepers.

Walter Scott

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

Carl Sandburg

What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing.

Jean Rhys

And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank

Joseph Conrad

Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.

Joseph Conrad

Son, it’s easy tae be guid oan a fu’ belly. It’s when a man’s goat two bites an’ wan o’ them he’ll share, ye ken whit he’s made o’. Listen. In ony country in the world, who are the only folk that ken whit it’s like tae leeve in that country? The folk at the boattom. The rest can a’ kid themselves oan. They can afford to hiv fancy ideas. We canny, son. We loass the wan idea o’ who we are, we’re deid. We’re wan anither. Tae survive, we’ll respect wan anither. When the time comes, we’ll a’ move forward thegither, or nut at all.

William McIlvanney

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