Quotes by Novelists - Page 21

If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about seeing it in print. I suppose it's the difference between masturbation and making love—the real writer wants to touch another person.

Edmund White

If goodness does exist, then I'm the opposite of it. I'm evil, and I revel in it

Anne Rice

Meantime the clang of the bows and the shouts of the combatants mixed fearfully with the sound of the trumpets, and drowned the groans of those who fell, and lay rolling defenceless beneath the feet of the horses. The splendid armour of the combatants was now defaced with dust and blood, and gave way at every stroke of the sword and battle-axe. The gay plumage, shorn from the crests, drifted upon the breeze like snowflakes. All that was beautiful in the martial array had disappeared, and what was now visibke was only calculated to awaken terror or compassion.

Walter Scott

Ice can kill as dead as fire.

George R.R. Martin

Would that the dead were not dead! But there is grass that must be eaten, pellets that must be chewed, hraka that must be passed, holes that must be dug, sleep that must be slept.

Richard Adams

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn’t be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead

Gustave Flaubert

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Hilary Mantel

Gold has its uses, but war is won with iron.

George R.R. Martin

But here's the most incredible thing about it: the philosopher isn't proposing that as a concept; he's simply articulating what humans believe about themselves. That first they thing and therefore then they exist.What follows on from that is even worse: that since humans live that way, thinking that first they thing and then they exist, they also think that anything that doesn't think, also doesn't fully exist. Trees, the sea, the fish in the sea, the sun, the moon, a hill or a whole mountain range. None of that exists all the way; it exists on a second plane of existence, a lesser existence. Therefore, it deserves to be merchandise or food or background for humans and nothing more.

Sabina Berman

To cement a new friendship especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person and cut across the accidents of place and time.

George Santayana

Let failure be your workshop. See it for what is is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition. (from Workbook)

Steven Heighton

It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.

John Fowles

Back therefore we find ourselves returning. Back to the wisdom of the plough; back to the wisdom of those who follow the sea. It is all a matter of the wheel coming full-circle. For the sophisticated system of mental reactions to which we finally give our adherence is only the intellectualised reproduction of what more happily constituted natures, without knowing what they possess, possess. Thus between true philosophers and the true simple people there is a magnetic understanding; whereas, the clever ones whose bastard culture only divorces them from the wisdom of the earth remain pilloried and paralysed on the prongs of their own conceit".

John Cowper Powys

Love is not love that wounded bleeds And bleeding sullies slow. Come death within my hands and I Unto my love will go.

Stevie Smith

You ought to be blowing me kisses, wench.

George R.R. Martin

What sort of gods make rats and plagues and dwarfs?

George R.R. Martin

You can never know everything, and part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of courage lies in going on anyway.

Robert Jordan

Data that comes subliminally and is acted upon will look like luck or inspiration.

Peter Redgrove

They tell each other what they are thinking. But there is no reason to believe anything they say.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Oh, I forgot to tell you the rest of it—he’s a widower now, so they can ride off together into the sunset, their wedding rings glinting.

Brenda Joyce

It was the dog Abel, who - as animals have been reported to do - had made his way over all England's hills and rivers, to return to that home where he was first kindly treated. The warm fire, by which he sleeps even now, and the fattening dish will be his rewards to the end of his days.

K.W. Jeter

If only my genitals didn't floatWhen I relaxed in the bathAnd we both looked down and we both agreedIt's stupid to be a man

Leonard Cohen

The guys can't take their eyes off Colleen... one of them... probably sees her just like I do, she's the gatekeeper to another world.

Ron Koertge

They walked off on the earthy path, laughing not quite naturally, for they could hardly help being pleased by the momentary attention of descending passengers and by their own almost meritorious youth.

Shirley Hazzard

As to women, I agree that each has three or four souls, but none of them a reasoning one.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.

Chinua Achebe

We do not posses imagination enough to sense what we are missing.

Jean Toomer

I speak of new cities and new peopleI tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,a sun dropped in the west.I tell you there is nothing in the worldonly an ocean of tomorrows.a sky of tomorrows.I am a brother of the cornhuskers who sayat sundown:Tomorrow is a day.”- Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers

Carl Sandburg

A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere?

René Daumal

For a time I hovered in that peaceful dreamland where nothing at all works properly but everything is okay.

William Giraldi

Poverty has in its favour an exquisite sleep filled with beautiful dreams.

Honoré de Balzac

He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

Tim O'Brien

Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

Ayn Rand

Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I told myself 'Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?

Guy de Maupassant

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.

Benjamin Disraeli

Oh, we had a lot of sex back then in Montreal; it wasn’t just me. Blame it on the cold. The roses in everyone’s cheeks made them seem way more appealing than they actually were. We confused the indoors with intimacy and electric heating with connection.

Heather O'Neill

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.

Gustave Flaubert

Florentino Ariza never had anotheropportunity to see or talk to Fermina Daza alone in the many chanceencounters of their very long lives until fifty-one years and ninemonths and four days later, when he repeated his vow of eternalfidelity and everlasting love on her first night as a widow.

Gabriel García Márquez

Myslím, že na místa, kde se odvíjely rozhodující události našich životů, stojí za to občas zavítat, abychom zjistili: nemáme sami se sebou nic společného.

Imre Kertész

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

George Santayana

Four rehabs meant a fifth was somewhere down the road.

John Grisham

I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.

Langston Hughes

And, above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.

Anthony Trollope

Putting his head down on the dog's neck, he vowed to himself fervently that he would always have some money on hand, no matter what became of him, so that he would be able to protect all that was truly valuable from the practical people in the world.

Morley Callaghan

Idleness and solitude led to these dramatics: an ordinary turd indulging himself as the chief of sinners.

Charles Portis

I realize that I can laugh, that it is possible to be happy, that laughter and hope can come back to me.

Philippa Gregory

Written words can also sing.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.

Joseph Conrad

There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another—if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn’t.

Ayn Rand

Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.

Gustave Flaubert

I lay in bed last night and thought of G.P. I thought of being in bed with him. I wanted to be in bed with him. I wanted the marvellous, the fantastic ordinariness of him. His promiscuity is creative. Vital. Even though it hurts. He creates love and life and excitement around him; he lives; the people he loves always remember him.I've always felt like it sometimes. Promiscuous. Anyone I see, even just some boy in the Tube, some man, I think what he would be like in bed. I look at their mouths and their hands, put on a prim expression and think about them having me in bed.Even Toinette, getting into bed with anyone. I used to think it was messy. But love is beautiful, any love. Even just sex.

John Fowles

Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows,Help us to seeThat without the dust the rainbowWould not be.

Langston Hughes

The RemoteI often think about youwhen I’m lying alone inmy room with my mouthopen and the remotelost somewhere in the bed.

Leonard Cohen

... time is how you spend your love ...

Nick Laird

He still smelled of limes. It made saliva come into her mouth. It made her feel that before she had been sleepy, and now she was awake.

Monica Ali

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

John Berger

O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

John Irving

Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman's hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?

George R.R. Martin

Death may be peaceful but the circumstances leading to it are more often than not anything but. They slept that day with their eyes open, with death as the companion of their dreams. Maybe you would like to imagine that they were looking at each other, heads twisted at grotesque angles or at the fading sun. Their bodies were just empty vessels and their eyes were windows that showed only a vacant home. Maybe it was because they had passed on into a world where the sun never set or maybe even a world where nothing existed but an infinite pool of darkness. You can choose to believe anything you want up to the time Death comes for you. After that, well, we can only imagin

Shitij Sharma

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