Quotes by Novelists - Page 28

The deadliest feeling that can be offered to a woman is pity.

Vicki Baum

All business opportunities stem from someone else's inability to resolve a simple and inevitable problem.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly. Each of its phrases found its way through the eyes of the Marquesa, then, carefully wrapped in understanding and forgiveness, it sank into her heart.

Thornton Wilder

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

Thomas Mann

When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.

Émile Zola

The only incorruptible thing about us.

Henry Fielding

And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.

Joseph Conrad

Nothing' isn't better or worse than anything. Nothing is just... nothing." Arya Stark

George R.R. Martin

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

Leonard Cohen

A stranger's eyes see clearest.

Charles Reade

The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn you can't congeal: there is a forward motion to yearning.

Gail Godwin

People like him, who buried their past so determinedly, should not help it from the grave so easily.

Steve Berry

Why have the English remained to English? Throughout India's history conquerors have come from elsewhere, and all of them --- Turk, Arab, Hun, Mongol, Persian --- have become Indian. If --- when ---this Pakistan happens, those Muslims who leave Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad to go there, They will be leaving their homes. But when the English leave, they'll be going home.

Kamila Shamsie

A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked, and could have only one book, what would it be? I always say, "How to Build a Boat.

Stephen Wright

I'm sure it's not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats.

Jasper Fforde

The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness.

Ayn Rand

...where our desires "come from"; that is a dark, winding road.

John Irving

and suddenly I am washed over by a wave of happiness for it, for my little story, because it is a place, a home even, and I can go back to it from wherever I am

David Grossman

All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so would I?

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

He himself felt defeated because he was fighting against something he did not hate, because he did not understand the fratricidal hatred between the sons of Araby and Israel, and because he loved and knew and appreciated and wanted to save the merits of their cultures, although not the cruelty of their powers; he knew and loved the fountains and the gardens and the patios and high towers of al-Andalus, the nature that has been made more beautiful by man for man's pleasure, not for his mortification.

Carlos Fuentes

I believe, Sebastian, that novels are more important than ever. They are more important than video recorders and record players and television because they enable us to exercise our minds. They allow us to step back and see where the history is taking us.

Imraan Coovadia

Such indeed was her image, that neither could Shakespeare describe, nor Hogarth paint, nor Clive act, a fury in higher perfection.

Henry Fielding

Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

If one had but a single glance to give the world one should gaze on Istanbul.

Alphonse de Lamartine

but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.

Gabriel García Márquez

Alas, my being the James Bond of vampires isn't the whole issue. Vanity must wait.

Anne Rice

That’s progress,” McIlveen

Tim Lebbon

The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy house of Europe. The gang of fortune-seekers who had succeeded in stealing a throne required a reign of adventures, shady transactions, sold consciences, bought women, and rampant drunkenness.

Émile Zola

Work on." Work as if every time you started with and every time you finish.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what's beyond ahead.

Núria Añó

All men must die. We are but death's instruments, not death himself.

George R.R. Martin

They breathed. They felt their lungs fill the sky, and they let the dark clouds inside them flow out. Then they connected to the earth.

Luis Alberto Urrea

I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.

Joseph Conrad

I write letters to my right brain all the time. They're just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two.

Sue Grafton

More than once have I thought, Why does crime, even when as powerful as Cæsar, and assured of being beyond punishment, strive always for the appearances of truth, justice, and virtue? Why does it take the trouble? I consider that to murder a brother, a mother, a wife, is a thing worthy of some petty Asiatic king, not a Roman Cæsar; but if that position were mine, I should not write justifying letters to the Senate. But Nero writes. Nero is looking for appearances, for Nero is a coward. But Tiberius was not a coward; still he justified every step he took. Why is this? What a marvellous, involuntary homage paid to virtue by evil! And knowest thou what strikes me? This, that it is done because transgression is ugly and virtue is beautiful. Therefore a man of genuine æsthetic feeling is also a virtuous man. Hence I am virtuous.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

If a man has no vices he's in great danger of making vices about his virtues and there's a spectacle.

Thornton Wilder

If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.

Muriel Barbery

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

Tim O'Brien

To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.

David Guterson

...you have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? And how may I become myself?

Paul Beatty

Let us accept truth even when it surprises us and alters our views.

George Sand

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.

Sue Monk Kidd

Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.

George Meredith

When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?

Muriel Barbery

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

Arnold Bennett

He paused, wishing to embrace her, but feeling for the moment that he should not. Then, reaching into a waistcoat pocket, he took from it a thin gold locket, the size of a silver dollar, which he opened and handed to her. One interior face of it was lined with a photograph of Berenice as a girl of twelve, thin, delicate, supercilious, self-contained, distant, as she was to this hour.

Theodore Dreiser

All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...

Shirley Jackson

In the midst of aches in the joints, anxiety over the payment of bills, concern for the safety of those you love, envy of the rich, fear of robbers, dog-weariness at the end of a long day, and the unacceptable slipping away of youth, there does occasionally appear, like a ray of light piercing the clouds, a moment of joy. Perhaps you have entered the house and sat down before removing your boots. A friend has pressed a drink into your hands, and is telling you the latest news. You see from his face that he's glad you've come in; and you are glad too. Glad to be sitting down, glad of the warming glow of the dirnk, glad of your friend's furrowed brow and eager speech. For this moment, nothing more is required. It is in its way unimprovable. This is what I mean by the Great Enough.

William Nicholson

The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Mother's delusions. Now, I don't know about the true things or the not-true things, because there seem to be so many of them, but I do know about Mother's delusions, and they're solid. They range from the conviction that the waffle iron, unless watched, is going to strangle the toaster, to the delusion that electricity pours out of an empty socket onto your head, and nothing is going to change any one of them.The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. I am, this morning, endeavoring to persuade you to join me in my deluded world; it is a happy, irrational, rich world, full of fairies and ghosts and free electricity and dragons, and a world beyond all others fun to walk around in. All you have to do---and watch this carefully please--is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.

Shirley Jackson

You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon—

Ayn Rand

A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.

John Berger

It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if not altogether acceptable) behavior of male writers; it would surely benefit me, as a writer, if I had the courage to seek out more of the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant myself. But women who seek out such things are made to feel ashamed, or else they sound stridently ridiculous in defending themselves -- as if they're bragging. ... Yet there are subjects that remain off-limits for women writers. It's not unlike that dichotomy which exists regarding one's sexual past: it is permissible, even attractive, for a man to have had one, but if a woman has had a sexual past, she'd better keep quiet about it.

John Irving

I've known rivers:I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes

She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.

Émile Zola

Does it afflict you to find your books wearing out? I mean literally .. . the mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me but that of books most of all.

William Dean Howells

Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things

Laurie Lee

Dragons are fire made flesh.

George R.R. Martin

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage; who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistable charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed with a ‘Good-night, father!’ Hourly they meet the gaze of eyes they would fain close forever, eyes that still open each morning to the light. . . God alone knows the number of those who are parricides in thought

Honoré de Balzac

The landscape of the mind, against which our thoughts and expectations move, when the wind of the imagination is active, changes as quickly as the clouds; and indeed it consists often of several landscapes, semi-transparent and showing through one another.

William Hurrell Mallock

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