Quotes by Novelists - Page 18

Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of his brown arm lightly covered with fine hairs. The sun shone goldly upon them. Something in Isabel's immobility attracted my attention, and I glanced at her. She was so still that you might have thought her hypnotized. Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate, but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence as I saw then on hers. It was a mask of lust. I would never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such unbridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human. The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made her hideous and frightening. It horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick.

W Somerset Maugham

And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don't trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.

Alan Furst

But even then I knew how it was going to be, I could feel the coming silence in the long, poisonous pauses that expanded as the night progressed.

Sue Miller

When he turned and walked into the living room he knew instantly why it was that he hadn’t wanted to come here, and that he ought to get out as soon as he possibly could. There, staring him in the face, was everything he’d been deprived of for the last five years.

William Maxwell

If there is anything in writing that comes easy for me it's making up metaphors. They just appear. I can't move two lines without all kinds of images. Then the problem is how to make the best of them. In its geological character, language is almost invariably metaphorical. That's how meanings tend to change. Words become metaphors for other things, then slowly disappear into the new image. I have a hunch, too, that the core of creativity is located in metaphor, in model making, really. A novel is a large metaphor for the world.

william gass

He's fine. He's fine,' he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down.'Why should he be unhappy?' she wanted to say. 'He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here?

Anne Enright

Misdirection. False signals. Spreading confusion. This is the Tao of deception.

David Ignatius

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.

Ayn Rand

Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted-I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them-just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept.

Ayn Rand

External conflicts we can avoid, resolve, or manage. But, when it comes to internal conflicts, there is only one viable option: resolve. Whatever internal conflict, major or minor, we don't resolve will grate within us nonstop. Fortunately, we can resolve all our internal conflicts with one simple strategy: Act the way it feels right, no matter how inconvenient the consequences are.

Indrajit Garai

What you were and what you are now... it's nothing... everything just lies in between...

shivangi lavaniya

Like some winter animal the moon licks the salt of your hand,Yet still your hair foams violet as a lilac treeFrom which a small wood-owl calls.

Johannes Bobrowski

Prophet,' he said, 'Your doctrines I do not know; therefore if I accepted them, I would do it out of fear like a coward and a base man. Are you anxious that your faith be professed by cowards and base people?

Henryk Sienkiewicz

She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.

John Fowles

his conscience washed clean by happiness.

Françoise Sagan

Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You’ve wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he’s ever held a truly personal desire, he’d find the answer. He’d see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He’s not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander’s delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can’t say about a single thing: ‘This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me’. Then he wonders why he’s unhappy.

Ayn Rand

He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening to the pianist who was playing a piece by Granados with velvet fingers.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

There's only so much room at the top of the heap. The rest of us are fill dirt.

Sue Grafton

The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.

José Saramago

For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.

Jasper Fforde

Life was like that- there would always be something scratching at the door. And whatever was scratching would just scratch and scratch until you opened the door.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Zapped while zipping.

Tim O'Brien

O what we ben! And what we come to!

Russell Hoban

Modern scientific accomplishments" --a wealth of methods coupled with a poverty of intentions which, having nearly exhausted the hell-potential of the earth, move on now to the first frontier of the heavens.

Kenneth Patchen

But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.

W Somerset Maugham

Preachers love only their own voices.

John Berger

I think we are wise, we English speakers, to savor accents. They teach us things about our own tongue.

Anne Rice

Every blade of grass was carved from emerald, every drip of water turned to diamond.

George R.R. Martin

To bury something, it is often considered, either means the end of something or the passing on into the realm of the earth or the sky, only the dead could ever know. But it is not only the dead that we bury. We bury objects, memories, thoughts and emotions among other things. Contrary to popular belief burying something is not the end of it because even though it is suppressed beneath layers of earth or self control, the dead and buried don’t always remain that way and that is where the stories come from, the stories that haunt us for the rest of our no longer carefree lives.

Shitij Sharma

Her father had learned only one thing in prison. Not humility, nor patience, nor understanding...Marshall Kofer had learned to listen, at least to his daughter".

John Grisham

Willmore: There is no sinner like a young saint.

Aphra Behn

If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.

Anne Michaels

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

William Golding

Colonel Talbot? he is a very disagreeable person, to be sure. He looks as if he thought no Scottish woman worth the trouble of handing her a cup of tea.

Walter Scott

As your father keeps clean his lamp to have good light, so keep clean your spirit.

Richard Llewellyn

Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.

Anne Michaels

You're only a man! You've not our gifts! I can tell you! Why, a woman can think of a hundred different things at once, all them contradictory!

Georgette Heyer

Now, money, for the night is coming. Money for my hair, money for my teeth, money for shoes that won't deform my feet (it's not so easy now to walk around in cheap shoes with very high heels), money for good clothes, money, money. The night is coming.

Jean Rhys

I see nothing that can unite us under the auspices of innocence and honor," he wrote to her. "In the future you will be alone, although at your husband's side, and I will ab alone in the midst of the world. The glory of having conquered ourselves will be our only consolation.

Gabriel García Márquez

A secret spoken finds wings.

Robert Jordan

Kurti had believed in politics, and politics had deceived him, the way politics deceives everyone.

Imre Kertész

It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. […] He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slopped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

W Somerset Maugham

Every ideal comes from us as do all the amenities of life, in order to make our existence as simple reproducers, for which divine Providence solely intended us, less monotonous and less hard.

Guy de Maupassant

Those fine eyes of hers had a disconcertingly direct gaze, and very often twinkled in a manner disturbing to male egotism. She had common-sense too, and what man wanted the plainly matter-of-fact, when he could enjoy instead Sophia's delicious folly?

Georgette Heyer

The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it all the past as well as all the future.

Joseph Conrad

At times people who are extremely sad become lighthearted for the most trivial reasons, merely to obtain the relief furnished by the exactly opposite condition.

Naguib Mahfouz

Peace at any price.

Alphonse de Lamartine

You know I'm not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations. I cannot split myself into two, one your friend and the other the king's servant.

Hilary Mantel

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

Benjamin Disraeli

I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.

James Dickey

the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors... For from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.

Lawrence Durrell

Most people, including Ma, preferred to brush unpleasantness away, as if, by sweeping it outside with the dust, it could be forgotten. As if, by acknowledging the existence of something unsavory in their community, they might be tainted by it themselves.

Shilpi Somaya Gowda

History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.

Jasper Fforde

But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.

Pierre Boulle

Always keep your foes confused. If they are never certain who you are or what you want, they cannot know what you are like to do next.

George R.R. Martin

Dreams turn to dust in light of day.

George R.R. Martin

Don't make another's pain the source of your own happiness.

Mark Frost

You can only kill disappointment with a new try.

Kim Stanley Robinson

The hound and hare were both so wearied that the peasant got them all.

Luo Guanzhong

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