Quotes by Novelists - Page 24

Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.

Tim O'Brien

New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people.

Anne Rice

She nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written.

Gabriel García Márquez

Because life is robust,Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism,Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Who can believe that there is no soul behind those luminous eyes?

Théophile Gautier

I don't like straight lines: men make them.

Richard Adams

He had not the makings of that honest man to whom success comes naturally.

James Jones

The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one's values, one's spirit makes one's body become the tribute, recasting it--as proof, as sanction, as reward--into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one's existence is necessary.

Ayn Rand

Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

Joseph Conrad

Adversity is like the period of the rain ... cold comfortless unfriendly to man and to animal yet from that season have their birth the flower the fruit the date the rose and the pomegranate.

Sir Walter Scott

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing their dreams

Gabriel García Márquez

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

Anthony Powell

I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth. Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. The mind is powerless against them. Yet we have to deal with them. If we want to accomplish anything, we have to deceive them into letting us accomplish it. Or force them. They understand nothing else. We cannot expect their support for any endeavor of the intellect, for any goal of the spirit. They are nothing but vicious animals. They are greedy, self-indulgent, predatory dollar-chasers

Ayn Rand

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

Wallace Stegner

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

Wilkie Collins

The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.

John Fowles

If such things were not so dangerous one would laugh. But one recognizes the technique. Such propaganda always begins with words, but soon it proceeds to deeds. When there are no facts to support lies, facts must be made.

Eric Ambler

Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.

Ayi Kwei Armah

If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.

Jasper Fforde

Audacity has made kings.

Prosper Jolyot de Crebillion

Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

You know, the immortality of the soul, free will and all that -- it's all very amusing to talk about up to the age of twenty-two, but not after that. Then one ought to be giving one's mind to having fun without catching the pox, arranging one's life as comfortably as possible, having a few decent drawings on the wall, and above all writing well. That's the important thing: well-made sentences...and then a few metaphors. Yes, a few metaphors. They embellish a man's existence.

Théophile Gautier

I would die rather than live without you. I would die the same way he died. I can't bear you to look at me the way you did. I cannot bear it if you do not love me!" -Claudia.

Anne Rice

I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart.

W Somerset Maugham

One could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one's mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one's image in the mirror.

Amitav Ghosh

Man is not the creature of circumstances circumstances are the creature of man. We are free agents and man is more powerful than matter.

Benjamin Disraeli

We tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense.

Dennis Potter

No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.

Yaa Gyasi

I do not like odd things until I can understand them.

Robert Jordan

The pursuit of truth is not important. The pursuit of that truth is important which helps you in reaching your goal that is provided you have one.

Ayn Rand

The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us.

Anne Rice

Beauty is a sense of harmony.

Ayn Rand

To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.

Muriel Barbery

We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways.

Shirley Jackson

A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her . . . but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.

W Somerset Maugham

Why do the Gods make kings and queens if not to protect the ones who can't protect themselves?

George R.R. Martin

Katherine of Aragon was speaking out for the women of the country, for the good wives who should not be put aside just because their husbands had taken a fancy to another, for the women who walked the hard road between kitchen, bedroom, church and childbirth. For the women who deserved more than their husband's whim.

Philippa Gregory

It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing.

Tim O'Brien

Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles, while girls adore horses because they are biological and have functions.

Wallace Stegner

As for what you're calling hard luck - well we made New England out of it. That and codfish.

Stephen Vincent Benét

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

John Fowles

We are the bourgeoisie—the third estate, as they call us now—and what we want is a nobility of merit, nothing more. We don't recognize this lazy nobility we now have, we reject our present class hierarchy. We want all men to be free and equal, for no one to be someone else's subject, but for all to be subject to the law. There should be an end of privileges and arbitrary power. Everyone should be treated equally as a child of the state, and just as there are no longer any middlemen between the layman and his God, so each citizen should stand in direct relation to the state. We want freedom of the press, of employment, of commerce. We want all men to compete without any special privileges, and the only crown should be the crown of merit.

Thomas Mann

What has being a girl to do with anything if a person in properly qualified?' ... 'It's what you call prejudice,' she said.

Ruth Park

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

Chinua Achebe

Let them enjoy their Eden while they can; though there's plenty of apples, I fear, on the tree yet, Mr Lawford.

Walter de la Mare

Life […] is scientific, that’s what it is.

William Golding

There are gods and there are true knights too. All the stories can't be lies.

George R.R. Martin

There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

Hilary Mantel

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.

Joseph Conrad

What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugène de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life.

Honoré de Balzac

I have some devotional books you can look over. Learn to quote from them. Nothing discourages unwanted questions as much as a flow of pious bleating.(Petyr Baelish to Sansa Stark)

George R.R. Martin

Then Royce's parry came a beat too late. The pale sword bit through the ringmail beneath his arm. The young Lord cried out in pain. Blood welled between the rings. It seemed red as fire where they touched the snow.

George R.R. Martin

I don't think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time—

Joseph Conrad

It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.

Anne Rice

Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a revolution. But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was a delicate work of high conscience. It was the education of the masters of the world. It should be as careful as the education given to kings.

Joseph Conrad

My heart was full of softening showers,I used to swing like this for hours,I did not care for war or death,I was glad to draw my breath.

Stevie Smith

These question-boundaries ...are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision.

John Fowles

I think I am a rare breed, a homosexual who doesn't like men.

Michel Tremblay

Your own chosen paths can never be wrong. It is just the intensity of your curiosity in you which is pretty low.

Shivam Chaudhary

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