Quotes by Novelists - Page 26

You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It's not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can't even remember your name.

Leonora Carrington

Hope is the first step to healing

Shilpa Menon

There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.

George Santayana

The death of a loved one is one of the worst experiences that life has to offer and yet it’s unavoidable, the only alternative being never loving in the first place. Life is so feeble, its flame extinguished as easily as blowing out a candle. All it takes is a misplaced step or disease, life eventually takes its course and the destination is always death.

Shitij Sharma

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

Gustave Flaubert

I have this idea stuck in my head that you have to be born beautiful in order to dream beautiful things. God didn't write beautiful on my heart. I'm stuck with all my bad dreams. Bad dreams for bad boys. I guess that's the way it is for me. Look, there's nothing I can do about it.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

But facts, remembered or not, are all, alas, still facts

Sōseki Natsume

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you have not committed.

Anthony Powell

Andrew Davies has said he prefers his authors dead, and I can see there is only a limited usefulness in a live one when it comes to adaptation.

Alan Hollinghurst

Living in the past is a dull and lonely business looking back strains the neck muscles causes you to bump into people not going your way.

Edna Ferber

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

Pico Iyer

Expectations is the mother of all negative energies within in you...

shivangi lavaniya

Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!

William Godwin

No man should live longer than his teeth.

George R.R. Martin

New nursery rhymes for new times. HIckory dickery dock my daddy's nuts from shelshock. Humpty dumpty thought he was wise till gas came along and hurned out his eyes. A dillar a dollar a ten o-clock schollar blow off his legs and then watch him holler...

Dalton Trumbo

Nevertheless man has found love, which is not a bad reply to that sly Deity, and he has adorned it with so much poetry that woman often forgets the sensual part of it. Those among us who are unable to deceive themselves have invented vice and refined debauchery, which is another way of laughing at God and paying homage, immodest homage, to beauty.

Guy de Maupassant

Do you think it will always be this way?”“What?”“I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?”I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. “I don't know,” I said. “Tomorrow.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Old enough to remember the arrival of 'Have a nice day', Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of 'Have a great one'. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? 'You have a profound and meaningful day now.

Edward St. Aubyn

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.

Robert Graves

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Hilary Mantel

Like all great travellers I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.

Benjamin Disraeli

Behind every work of art lies the enormous pretension of exhibiting one's vision of the world. If such obvious arrogance is not counterbalanced by the tribulations of doubt, all that remains is a monster who is to art what a fanatic is to faith.

Amélie Nothomb

You think that I am naive, but it is you who are naive. You have no idea what is happening inside of you when you look at a painting. You think that you are getting close to art voluntarily, enticed by its beauty, that this intimacy is taking place in an atmosphere of freedom and that delight is being born in you spontaneously, lured by the divine rod of Beauty. In truth, a hand has grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, led you to this painting and has thrown you to your knees. A will mightier than your own told you to attempt to experience the appropriate emotions. Whose hand and whose will? That hand is not the hand of a single man, the will is collective, born in an interhuman dimension, quite alien to you. So you do not admire at all, you merely try to admire.

Witold Gombrowicz

He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. 'Of course there will be a revolution,' he said. 'You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.

Hilary Mantel

Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor? The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment.

Walker Percy

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

Gustave Flaubert

He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.

Hilary Mantel

...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.

José Saramago

Goddamn it, do it yourself. You’re five hundred years old and you can’t use a telephone? Read the directions. What are you, an immortal idiot?

Anne Rice

The fate of animals is of far greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous.

Émile Zola

Freud was a genius; geniuses are bright but not necessarily right. What they do do, right or wrong, is to provide images that guide, or compel, the lives of the rest of us. If we are not careful we may accept the inevitability of these images. It seems that great men offer us a portion of reality and, because of their greatness, we take it for the whole.

Peter Redgrove

Of all the things I dislike, I hate women worst.

James Jones

It came out sparkling like liquid sky.

Laurie Lee

Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow.

Anne Fortier

He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover — that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it.

John Fowles

The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

Thornton Wilder

It is hard to die unmourned.

George R.R. Martin

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

James Jones

-I love you, Lenny.-From the diaphragm.-What are you talking about?-You have to say it from the diaphragm. That's a muscle in here. Real deep, not from the throat. I tried to be an actor once and that's the first thing they told me. That's when I quit. I just didn't have that much in my diaphragm.

Romain Gary

nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice

Pico Iyer

I dislike this whole business of experimentation on animals, unless there's some very good and altogether exceptional reason to this very case. The thing that gets me is that it's not possible for the animals to understand why they are being called upon to suffer. They don't suffer for their own good or benefit at all, and I often wonder how far it's for anyone's. They're given no choice, and there is no central authority responsible for deciding whether what's done is morally justifiable. These experiment animals are just sentient objects; they're useful because they are able to react; sometimes precisely because they're able to feel fear and pain. And they're used as if they were electric light bulbs or boots. What it comes to is that whereas there used to be human and animal slaves, now there are just animal slaves. They have no legal rights or choices in the matter.

Richard Adams

Justice is an affectation of perspective, not a universal value.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The people in the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions she had asked. They hadn't appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer among the living. Her love was so strong that Tolya's death was unable to affect it: to her, he was still alive.She was mad, but no one had noticed. Now, at last, she had found Tolya. Her joy was like that of a mother-cat when she finds her dead kitten and licks it all over.A soul can live in torment for years and years, even decades, as it slowly, stone by stone, builds a mound over a grave; as it moves towards the apprehension of eternal loss and bows down before reality.

Vasily Grossman

There is no shame in loving.

George R.R. Martin

Nothing burns like the cold.

George R.R. Martin

The only joy in the world is to begin.

Cesare Pavese

Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, "My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war.

Sinclair Lewis

At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.

Gabriel García Márquez

If the word frankly or sincerely is not uttered in the first ten minutes-or let us speak openly-then you are not in the presence of a genuine businessman and he will certainly go bankrupt.

Francoise Mallet-Joris

Honor is kind of what you get when you weaponize manners ...

Jasper Fforde

More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.

Benjamin Disraeli

Some troubles like a protested note of a solvent debtor bear interest.

Honoré de Balzac

...grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.

George R.R. Martin

Take taking from those that give & nobody anywhere will need any more such gifts.

Kenneth Patchen

The canter is a cure for every evil.

Benjamin Disraeli

The gods are blind and men see only what they wish.

George R.R. Martin

‎The greatest danger of a terrorist's bomb is in the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.

Octave Mirbeau

I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope.

Sue Monk Kidd

He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Previous 1 … 24 25 26 27 28 … 31 Next