Quotes by Novelists - Page 25

I gave him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.

David James Duncan

Learning to learn is to know how to navigate in a forest of facts ideas and theories a proliferation of constantly changing items of knowledge. Learning to learn is to know what to ignore but at the same time not rejecting innovation and research.

Raymond Queneau

But the lucidity of her old age allowed her to see, and she said so many times, that the cries of children in their mothers' wombs are not announcements of ventriloquism or a faculty for prophecy but an unmistakable sign of an incapacity for love.

Gabriel García Márquez

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

Thomas Mann

Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we'd never be able to choose our own destiny.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The only cure for grief is action.

G. H. Lewes

No friend to Love like a long voyage at sea.

Aphra Behn

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.

Heather O'Neill

I eat you, life; you make me living eat.

William Kean Seymour

He was taking Kevin’s cherry! The words made him harder and made him feel privileged, masterful, married. He thought how many men would pay unlimited amounts to have this inaugurating experience with this boy. He didn’t want to feel like a middle-aged paedophile, he didn’t even want to think all this would make a good porn film. He wanted every thrust, every second, to be laden with tenderness, a salute from him to Kevin, a deep recognition. He wanted Kevin to like what was being done to him, to push back for another joyous millimetre of penetration. He didn’t want him to label it Guy’s First Fuck or Kevin’s First Time. He didn’t want the idea and the label to crowd out the sensation or to sharpen it; he wanted it to be pure sex, undramatised.

Edmund White

Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.

Ben Lerner

A rich man loves to work, a poor man loves to eat.

Dương Thu Hương

I don't want you to be young and beautiful. I only want one thing. I want you to be kind-hearted - and not just towards cats and dogs.

Vasily Grossman

If we were scars, our memories would be the stitches holding us together. You couldn't cut them apart, and if you did, it would tear you in two.""But my memories hurt," she said. "I want to forget. There's so much I just want to forget.""How are you going to do that ? Everything that's happened to you is still happening today. Once something has begun, it doesn't end. There, in your head, it never ends.

Kai Meyer

We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of 'Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

Ayn Rand

Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness.

Thornton Wilder

Everything she heard, everything she saw seemed to be in disagreement with her own manner of understanding and feeling. To her, the sun did not appear red enough, the nights pale enough, the skies deep enough. Her fleeting conception of things and beings condemned her fatally to a perversion of her senses, to vagaries of the spirit and left her nothing but the torment of an unachieved longing, the torture of unfulfilled desires.

Octave Mirbeau

God didn't make Eve from Adam's rib. He took out half of Adam's brain by accident.

Shirley Jump

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

Anthony Trollope

I, too, am among those unable to step outside the realm of worldly distinctions. I hide my excesses of joy and sorrow beneath a robe of false contentment and drown in a pool of tears unseen by others. How I envy those naive enough to covet the glory of others. Do they not realize that tears fall not only on the sleeves of worn and tattered kimonos? The jewels that spill, glittering, onto my brocade are the very water of life, but they are mistaken for mere ornament. Although no one notices, my heart is shattered into a thousand pieces.

Shikin Shimizu

Small hopes can grow surprising fruit.

Robert Jordan

...the pleasures of the world are chiefly folly, and the business of it mostly knavery, and both nothing better than vanity; the men of pleasure tearing one another to pieces from the emulation of spending money, and the men of business from envy in getting it.

Henry Fielding

In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.

Wallace Stegner

There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.

Sue Monk Kidd

The future is the most expensive luxury in the world.

Thornton Wilder

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.

Steven Heighton

And maybe that is what it comes down to, knowing what the other person needs even before they know it themselves. Maybe it’s just that simple and it is only us who make it complicated with our anniversaries and our gifts, with grand declarations and public demonstrations, empty words and valuable stones.

Shitij Sharma

People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear

Ayn Rand

Remember that everything that is good, whatever it’s origin, comes from the holy spirit.

Gabriel García Márquez

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

Monique Wittig

It is not perhaps a question of truthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when the ingenuously write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god reading--perhaps--over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman, to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even higher genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous works of men themselves, the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them.

Rémy de Gourmont

In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.

Émile Zola

Heroes in the stories never had to sleep in haystacks, or under hedges. But it was not easy to pretend, anymore, that he was a hero in a story.

Robert Jordan

No, Sully'd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn't, any more than he'd blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn't pay to second-guess every one of life's decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older.

Richard Russo

The end is but a new beginning for the eternal "Ba.

Inge H. Borg

Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime, with a gift of tears;Grief, with a glass that ran;Pleasure, with pain for leaven;Summer, with flowers that fell;Remembrance, fallen from heaven,And madness risen from hell;Strength without hands to smite;Love that endures for a breath;Night, the shadow of light,And Life, the shadow of death.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Have you ever been going somewhere with a crowd and you're certain it's the wrong road and you tell them, but they won't listen, so you just have to plod along in what you know is the wrong direction till somebody more important gets the same idea?

James Hilton

She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.

Gustave Flaubert

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.

John Fowles

For the "We" must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within a man's soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all evils on earth, the root of man's torture by men, and an unspeakable lie.

Ayn Rand

Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth...

Keri Hulme

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

Pico Iyer

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

William H. Gass

Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.

Nadeem Aslam

How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.

Lawrence Durrell

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep…

José Saramago

It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world’s doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries—to remain human, since the human is the rational.

Ayn Rand

Someone once told me that we move when it becomes less painful than staying where we are".

Anne Hines

But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies that had begun to come out when Roosevelt we

James Jones

Chromatacia…society…ruled by a colortocracy…social hierarchy based upon one's limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see.

Jasper Fforde

People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.

Gustave Flaubert

How can you care about the image of a landscape, when you show by your deeds that you don't care for the landscape itself?

William Morris

Philosophy has a fine saying for everything - for Death it has an entire set.

Laurence Sterne

I promise.For the other side of the card, I put the giraffe and penguin on it and wrote:To think and try not to over think.To breathe, but not hyperventilate.To try to envision the best, and not dwell on the worst.To call you when I'm in trouble.To not do anything permanent on a situation that might be temporary.

Shirley Miranda

But Moby-Dick is the explanation of America. It’s not just a novel. It is a book of prophecy. It is the book. It is the book of America.

Robert Stone

When the Russian delegate this summer indicated the Soviet Union's interest in sending medical equipment, Dr Shigeto went right away to see the delegate and settle the matter tactfully. He is careful to steer clear of the superficial swirl of political maneuvering, but never misses any opportunity to improve the capability of the A-bomb Hospital or to enhance concretely the welfare of the patients. In that sense, he sometimes refers to himself as a 'dirty handkerchief.' That is, he serves to filter political purposes out of relief efforts so that the effect on patients is purely and concretely humane.

Kenzaburō Ōe

The word "education" comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.

Muriel Spark

I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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