Quotes by Novelists - Page 23

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

Tim O'Brien

One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed "God knows which was right.

Carl Sandburg

When I thought of myself, of the feelings I had, of the things I thought I understood so well, I imagined myself somehow abstractly, because that other visual recollection was painful and unpleasant for me. No sooner would I call to mind my physical appearance than the finest, most lyrical, wonderful visions would vanish in an instant - so monstrous was its disparity with the intangible, glittering world that existed in my imagination. It seemed to me that there could be no greater contrast than that between my inner life and my outward appearance; sometimes I even imagined that I was trapped in someone else's strange, almost hateful body.

Gaito Gazdanov

In the room of holding out an example for imitation, [the nobility] give only a warning to the lower classes of the people, who are taught to despise the boasted pre-eminence of birth, when attached to the meanest actions and most unwarrantable pursuits; and from hence proceeds all the licentiousness and spirit of equality that causes general disturbance.

Eliza Parsons

She wants her cup of stars.

Shirley Jackson

It is one of the beautiful compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Charles Dudley Warner

We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.

Honoré de Balzac

Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

Muriel Spark

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.

Jean Rhys

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

Thornton Wilder

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.

Thomas Mann

That's sounds right. Another $5,000 went to dress up the Little League park where he had played so many games. Seems like he paid off the MORTAGE on his parents' home, which wasn't that much.

John Grisham

We're frightened of what makes us different.

Anne Rice

Can you drown in grief? She turned away sharply, angry with her own frailty. She had no time for the luxury of self-pity.

George R.R. Martin

And books, they offer one hope -- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

Anne Rice

The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred.

Honoré de Balzac

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

Gustave Flaubert

Вера в себя способна творить такие же чудеса, как вера в Господа Бога.

Honoré de Balzac

Some people never have any luck. All at once, as though a thick veil had been whisked aside, he clearly saw the wretchedness―the bottomless, monotonous wretchedness―of his existence. The wretchedness which had been, which was, and which was yet to come. His last days indistinguishable from the first, with nothing ahead of him or behind him or around him, nothing in his heart, nothing anywhere.

Guy de Maupassant

And I saw her as a sad thirtieth child of Valentine that fell, not as Lucifer rebelling against God, but because she too passionately wanted to be united with him! All things in excess become sin.

Lawrence Durrell

Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.

Arnold Bennett

Whatever may have been said of the satiety of pleasure and of the disgust which usually follows passion, any man who has anything of a heart and who is not wretchedly and hopelessly blasé feels his love increased by his happiness, and very often the best way to retain a lover ready to leave is to give one's self up to him without reserve.

Théophile Gautier

The source of man's rights is not divine law or a congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A ___ and man is man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product for his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational

Ayn Rand

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.

May Sarton

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the side walk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your partner was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you

Heather O'Neill

worms have crawled up your nose and eaten your wits.

George R.R. Martin

Maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you've been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don't know where you are? So you burn cars, ecause when you have no culture, you're no longer a civilised animal, you're a wild beast. And a wild beast burns and kills and pillages.

Muriel Barbery

When I was a boy, I used to wake up thinking that the world was ending.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

He'd call me false and faithless and I've always had a weakness for those two words; next to cruel, they're the nicest words for a woman to hear, and not so hard to earn.

Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos

Yes, being black is a full-time job: sometimes you are invisible, other times you are hyper-visible,” he says. “Sometimes you are welcome, other times you are not. The thermostat is always moving and you have to keep adapting to find some comfort level. Richard Pryor used to talk about going to Africa and people there telling him he was white. Even though he was black, he just wasn’t black enough.

Paul Beatty

Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.

Carl Sandburg

Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.

José Saramago

The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.

Ouida

During the Japanese invasion, bombs had fallen from the sky and people could run for cover. Now, they exploded in the middle of the road, or in the fields while people were playing soccer.

Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

The poor are very well off, at least the agricultural poor, very well off indeed. Their incomes are certain, that is a great point, and they have no cares, no anxieties; they always have a resource, they always have the House. People without cares do not require as much food as those whose life entails anxieties. See how long they live!

Benjamin Disraeli

Time — how it expands to fill the spaces you create; how it makes meagre experiences seem never-ending. Whenever he heard people talk about the ravages of time, about how it robbed and deprived, Justin always smiled; because for him, time was an accomplice, plugging the gaps and fleshing out morsels of memory so he would have something substantial to hang on to. That way, however little he had seen or felt, he would always feel as if he had more: a life far richer than the truth.

Tash Aw

Anything you like; anything I like... No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us

Jean Rhys

The Universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers."Stanley Kunitz

Shirley A. Moore

Some seek the limelight and some hold the light in place

Suanne Laqueur

Several died the day the bomb was dropped. Some lived six months after the explosion but died anyway. They were all lost. It was so long ago, young man. To you it is a history story. To me it is my life.

Joseph G. Peterson

You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.

Jean Lorrain

You ask my love completest,As strong next year as now,The devil take you, sweetest,Ere I make aught such vow.Life is a masque that changes,A fig for constancy!No love at all were better,Than love which is not free.

Ernest Dowson

Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.

Anthony Powell

I didn't wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly

Nevil Shute

Waiting turns men into bears in a barn, and women into cats in a sack.

Robert Jordan

I have done many impious things--no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.

Robert Graves

I wanted to smell the guitars. It's hard to explain but they have a smell. And the best way I could ever describe it would be to say they smell like potential. Ambition and desire. If such things had a smell.

Barbara Hall

Friendships like marriages are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

John D. MacDonald

Listen to me. Forget all you saw. Leave it. Take your mind from it. It has nothing to do with you. But use it for experience. Now you know what hurt it brings to women when men come into the world. Remember, and make it up to your Mama and to all women...And another thing let it do. There is no room for pride in any man. There is no room for unkindness. There is not room for wit at the expense of others. All men are born the same, and equal. As you saw today, so come Captains and the Kings and the Tinkers and the Tailors. Let the memory direct your dealings with men and women. And be sure to take good care of Mama. Is it?

Richard Llewellyn

Don't go back over the past. Let it depart, never to return.

Naguib Mahfouz

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

Jasper Fforde

Rain clouds and stormy moods take time to blow away, but sooner or later the sun always comes out.

Shirley Parenteau

8 April 1891The obscenity of nostrils and mouths; the ignominious cupidity of smiles and women encountered in the street; the shifty baseness on every side, as of hyenas and wild beasts ready to bite: tradesmen in their shops and strollers on their pavements. How long must I suffer this? I have suffered it before, as a child, when, descending by chance to the servant's quarters, I overheard in astonishment their vile gossip, tearing up my own kind with their lovely teeth.This hostility to the entire race, this muted detestation of lynxes in human form, I must have rediscovered it later while at school. I had a repugnance and horror for all base instincts, but am I not myself instinctively violent and lewd, murderous and sensual? Am I any different, in essence, from the members of the riotous and murderous mob of a hundred years ago, who hurled the town sergeants into the Seine and cried, 'String up the aristos!' just as they shout 'Down with the army!' or 'Death to the Jews!

Jean Lorrain

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

John Berger

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.

Françoise Sagan

Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, and men below, and the saints above, for love is heaven, and heaven is love.

Walter Scott

Blest who was youthful in his youth;blest who matured at the right time;who gradually the chill of lifewith years was able to withstand;who never was addicted to strange dreams;who did not shun the fashionable rabble;who was at twenty fop or blade,and then at thirty, profitably married;who rid himself at fiftyof private and of other debts;who fame, money, and rankin due course calmly gained;about whom lifelong one kept saying:N. N. is an excellent man.But it is sad to think that to no purposeyouth was given us,that we betrayed it every hour,that it duped us;that our best wishes,that our fresh dreamings,in quick succession have decayedlike leaves in putrid autumn.It is unbearable to see before oneonly of dinners a long series,to look on life as on a rite,and in the wake of the decorous crowdto go, not sharing with iteither general views, or passions.

Alexander Pushkin

For Mercier, it was the ceremony of the mass that eased his soul: the sweetish smoke trailing from the censer, the ringing of the bell, the Latin incantations of the priest. In Warsaw, he attended early mass, at a small church near the apartment, once or twice a month, confessing to his vocational sins – duplicity, for example – in the oblique forms provided by Catholic protocol. He’d grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding and prayed for those he’d lost, for those he loved, and for an end to evil in the world.” ― Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw

Alan Furst

I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

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