Quotes by Novelists - Page 27

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

Langston Hughes

Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

John Irving

Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind", said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. "I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can't reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge returns or I seek it out in a knew source."(...)"But you love books, then", Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen."Oh, yes," Lestat said. "Sometimes they're the only thing that keeps me alive.""What a thing to say at your age", she laughed."No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate," he said frankly. "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 thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking. It didn't take him many winters to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out.

Hilary Mantel

Luckily for me, I loved books. Books can enlighten but can also benight, but at least one can play one off against another.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.

Ayn Rand

The race of mankind would perish did they cease to aid each other. We cannot exist without mutual help. All therefore that need aid have a right to ask it from their fellow man and no one who has the power of granting can refuse it without guilt.

Sir Walter Scott

Fourteen is the age when time first starts to make its presence felt. Time took on such a variety of hues in those days that even my frozen mind sometimes reflected the colours of the world around me, and I could feel my thoughts fluttering in the humid, salty breeze. At such moments, when the brilliant blue skies, the flaming carpets beneath the Gulmohur trees in the school grounds and the nut-brown twinkle in Sonia’s eyes splashed into the moments of my life, I felt alive. Only time had no colour in the library. In the library, time simply ceased to be.

Indu Muralidharan

No one has ever died of restlessness, but rashness is another matter. We've planted seeds, let them grow.

George R.R. Martin

Dying is a dull, dreary affair. my advice is that you have nothing whatever to with it.

W Somerset Maugham

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.

W Somerset Maugham

A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even when she longs to serve herself or her children. She has to put him first even if she longs to judge for herself. She has to put him first even when she knows best. To be a good wife is to be a woman with a will of iron that you yourself have forged into a bridle to curb your own abilities. To be a good wife is to enslave yourself to a lesser person. To be a good wife is to amputate your own power as surely as the parents of beggars hack off their children's feet for the greater benefit of the family.

Philippa Gregory

Depression is rage spread thin.

George Santayana

If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: 'The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!

Ayn Rand

The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

Ayn Rand

I think we’re losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here,” said Genevieve. But we feared that if she was washed out, people would look right past the flyer.

Joshua Ferris

The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance the farther there is to go and the more there is to say the less time there is to say it.

Gabrielle Roy

War does not answer war, war does not finish war. The only ending is peace.

Philippa Gregory

It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience . . .

George Gissing

I am going to die, but that is of no importance.

Muriel Barbery

I do not think consciously of children [when writing] … I do know that children read me more intelligently than adults do.

Alan Garner

Iyther you dont know nothing or you know too much it dont seam like theres any thing in be twean.

Russell Hoban

She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you.

Jean Rhys

I wasn't particularly worried; running is overrated anyway, and sport only makes you sweaty and smug and wears out the knees.

Jasper Fforde

Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be, like the reality of yesterday, an illusion tomorrow.

Luigi Pirandello

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

John Irving

Pleasured equallyIn seeking as in finding,Each detail minding,Old Walt went seekingAnd finding.

Langston Hughes

Society conspires against her from early infancy. Her brain is steadily filled with plaster until it sets: ‘If you’re not married by the time you’re twenty-five, you’ll have good reason to be ashamed’; ‘if you laugh, you won’t look dignified’ ; ‘if your face betrays your feelings, you’ll look coarse’; ‘if you mention the existence of a single body hair, you’re repulsive’ ; ‘if a boy kisses you on the cheek in public, you’re a whore’; if you enjoy eating, you’re a pig’; ‘if you take pleasure in sleeping, you’re no better than a cow’; and so on.These precepts would be merely anecdotal if they weren’t taken so much to heart.

Amélie Nothomb

For inside all the weakness of old age the spirit God knows is as mercurial as it ever was.

May Sarton

Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.

Ngaio Marsh

It is only when I dally with what I am about look back and aside instead of keeping my eyes straight forward that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart.

Sir Walter Scott

Ad we interviewing each other?Something like that.What position am I applying for?Best friend.I thought I already had the job.Don't be so sure, you arrogant son of a bitch.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

He was terribly conscious that he only had one life and with seemed to sad to think that he had wasted it. He could never surmount his immeasurable regret. And that's why I tell you that Byring is right. Even though it only lasts five years, even though he ruins his career, even though this marriage ends in disaster, it will have been worth while. He will have been satisfied. He will have fulfilled himself.

W Somerset Maugham

When I think about John William now, I think about someone who followed through, and then I'm glad not to have followed through, to still be breathing, to still be here with people, to still be walking in the mountains, and to still be uncertain--even with all this cash on hand--in a way I seem to have no choice about. I'm a hypocrite, of course, and I live with that, but I live.

David Guterson

There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will – but more often than not I am face-to-face with a stranger, a companion to something I recognise as myself, sure enough, but one who knows more than I do, thinks less of danger and propriety than I ever have or will, feels a cool and amused contempt for the rules and rituals by which I live, the duties I too readily accept, the compromises I too willingly allow (p. 262)

John Burnside

An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.

Alberto Moravia

And whatever it is that keeps widening your heart that's Mary too not only the power inside you but the love. And when you get down to it Lily that's the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love - but to persist in love.

Sue Monk Kidd

You ever get the feeling the world's filling up with bastards? I do. What I want to know is what happens when all the bastards run out of people to crap on? What happens when all that's left in the world is bastards? . . . The golden rule. Screw unto others before they screw unto you.

William Hoffman

For it is discomfort's own essence to be near a man and to feel him in torture of misery, to feel with him the very pain of the misery, and yet to be unable to help.

Richard Llewellyn

The central movement of the mind is the desire for unrestricted liberty and (...) this movement is invariably accompanied by its opposite, a dread of the consequences of liberty.

Thornton Wilder

The funny thing about work itself, it was so bearable. The dreariest task was perfectly bearable. It presented challenges to overcome, the distraction provided by a sense of urgency, and the things made work utterly, even harmoniously bearable.

Joshua Ferris

Idly, Wick wondered if he should feel insulted. Then he decided there really wasn't any room for considering an insult with all the fear running rampant in his mind. Maybe he was quiet on the outside, but he knew he was running around screaming inside his thoughts.

Mel Odom

In fact, the room was so quiet you might have heard a drop of paint splash.

Jasper Fforde

Speech is the small change of silence.

George Meredith

Information age. I guess I'm part of it, even if I can't remember how to use my iPhone from week to week, and have to learn how to send e-mails all over again every couple of years, and can't retain any profound technological knowledge about the computers I sometimes use.

Anne Rice

The capacity of passion is both cruel and divine

George Sand

There is noroom for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser’s hole of a privateego. Be empty in order to be filled. ’He that loveth his life shall lose it; andhe that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.

Ayn Rand

Emergencies send sparks to the darkest corner of us. They wake up our hormones and neurotransmitters, they remove the rust from our body and mind, and they show us we can still handle crisis with poise. Emergencies push us to our limits. At those limits, the best inside us comes out. The eyes of our mind open, exceptional vision occurs to us, and we have a chance to become extraordinary.

Indrajit Garai

There’d never been anyone who could knife him so with a momentary word, and then speak the wound away in the very next moment. If all those little boyhood heartbreaks had been supposed to make him ready for this, Demane wasn’t.

Kai Ashante Wilson

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,Yea, all the time, because the dance was long;I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Ernest Dowson

As Daenerys Targaryen rose to her feet, her black hissed, pale smoke venting from its mouth and nostrils. The other two pulled away from her breasts and added their voices to the call, translucent wings unfolding and stirring the air, and for the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons.

George R.R. Martin

Courage is fire and bullying is smoke.

Benjamin Disraeli

We are so afraid of the idea of having to die… that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn…

José Saramago

Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images, the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire: that is MUHAMMAD. As regards all the standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask IS THERE ANY MAN GREATER THAN HE?

Alphonse de Lamartine

Except for a couple of hours in the morning which I passed in the company of a sage I stayed in bed without food only a few mouthfuls of water “you are a fine looking old man” I said to myself in the mirror “and what is more you have the correct attitude You don’t care if it ends or if it goes on And as for the women and the music there will be plenty of that in Paradise” Then I went to the Mosque of Memory to express my gratitude

Leonard Cohen

Curiosity is a descending stair…that leads to only who-knows-where.

Jasper Fforde

This was the end of the Renaissance. Culture, once beloved and fostered by the papacy, opened the way to dangerous freedom. Then - as now - knowledge, culture, intellectual curiosity became suspect, even dangerous to oppressive regimes: knowledge leading to engaging the mind into reasoning, culture into wanting to know more, intellectual curiosity sharpening the appetite for information, fact. Ignorance was considered safe and political oppression went hand in hand with the congregation of the Inquisition.

Gaia Servadio

If you think you are powerless, then you are

Monica Ali

Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Carl Sandburg

The man who does good in doubt must have so much more merit than one who does it in the bright certainty of belief. "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold..." A warning against the smugness of inherited faith.

Morris West

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