Quotes by Novelists - Page 29

I touched the small sacred images. I shook my head and bit my lip, as if to say, How awful that he should have stolen these! But I also found it very funny. And further proof that God had no power over me.

Anne Rice

It seemed to him that the little Manchu had never looked so radiant. She gave him a most charming smile, but her eyes were all for the boy.

James Hilton

She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above.

George R.R. Martin

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

Edna O'Brien

Modern literature is a north-east wind--a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it.

Thomas Love Peacock

Love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness.

Nadeem Aslam

Sometimes you literally need some pressure on your shoulder, to fetch the best in you...

Shivam Saxena

[The wilderness] had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.

Joseph Conrad

Hold fast to dreamsfor if dreams dielife is a broken-winged birdthat can not fly.Hold fast to dreamsfor when dreams golife is a barren fieldfrozen with snow.

Langston Hughes

The young doctor was disappointed: he had never had th eopportunity to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been surprised that he had not seen him at the Medical School, but he understood in an instant from the young man's blush and Andean accent that he was probably a recent arrival to the city. He said: "There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance one of these days." And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remeber, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice. "And when you do find one, observe with care," he said to the intern: "they almost always have crystals in their heart.

Gabriel García Márquez

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Evil is a point of view. We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms.

Anne Rice

Though he plunged into work as another man might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love.

May Sinclair

We are all brands. Some have been discovered, some aren’t.

Shivali Singla

It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face.

Anne Rice

He liked the girls, liked to hold them around the waist, felt like a man when he did. But as for talking with them, no, no! Then he felt as though he were dealing with another species of human being, in some cases a higher one, in others a lower. He secretly admired the weak, pale, little girl and had picked her to be his wife. That was still the only way he could think of a woman - as a wife. He danced in a very chaste and proper manner, but he heard awful stories about his pals, stories he didn't understand until later. They could dance the waltz backwards around the room in a very indecent way, and they told naughty stories about the girls.

August Strindberg

Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape.

Andrew Sean Greer

Blessed is the covenant of love, the covenant of mercy, useless light behind the terror, deathless song in the house of night.

Leonard Cohen

No one would argue that we owe a debt of gratitude to the Goliath Corporation. They helped us to rebuild after the Second War and it should not be forgotten. Of late, however, it seems as though the Goliath Corporation is falling far short of its promises of fairness and altruism. We are finding ourselves now in the unfortunate position of continuing to pay back a debt that has long since been paid--with interest...

Jasper Fforde

The dead are mute, but the living still have voice with which to protest their innocence. Often their objections are noisy and pious, impossible to refute since the person who could condemn them has been silenced forever.

Sue Grafton

Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.

Ayn Rand

Marvellous!" he repeated, looking up at me. "Look! The beauty--but that is nothing--look at the accuracy, the harmony. And so fragile! And so strong! And so exact! This is Nature--the balance of colossal forces. Every star is so--and every blade of grass stands so--and the mighty Kosmos il perfect equilibrium produces--this. This wonder; this masterpiece of Nature--the great artist.

Joseph Conrad

Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.

Ayn Rand

People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

Anne Rice

This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.

Hilary Mantel

The horror was this: the others.

Anne Rice

The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.

Alan Hollinghurst

Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Be frank and explicit. That is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others.

Benjamin Disraeli

In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.

Muriel Barbery

There's a major fault in Western society. It makes room for only one god, and in only one gender. There's no balance, no co-existence, no partnership.

Tomson Highway

Then she rushes to pick up Asha from school, where she is known only as "Asha's mom" by the other mothers, who seem to all spend a lot of time together. Somer has no time for the PTA and bake sales. She has no time for herself. Her profession no longer defines her, but neither does being a mother. Both are pieces of her, and yet they don't seem to add up to a whole.

Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Speak to me of love said St Francis to the almond tree and the tree blossomed.

Nicholas Kazantzakis

...the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.""...a ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.

George R.R. Martin

The life wont follow your path. You're not God.

shivani lal

Destiny doesn't do home visits... you have to go for it yourself.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

At certain moments, words are nothing; it is thetone in which they are uttered.

Paul Bourget

Do it now even-though your Lazy mind says, Will do later

Shinu :)

1My father says a hunch is your brain’s way of taking a short cut to the truth,’ replied Max.‘He’s a wise man, your father. What else does he say?’‘That the more you try to hide from the truth, the quicker it finds you.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.

Sinclair Lewis

Jesus...remains in control of my circumstances, no matter the size of the waves.

Shirley Corder

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.

William Golding

He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs.

Joseph Conrad

There is a distressing but not uncommon condition of presidents and other world leaders known as Worrying about Africa. It is usually picked up overseas as at summit meeting on world poverty or disease, and symptoms include painful twinges of guilt over the discrepancy between First and Third World wealth, uncomfortable feelings somewhere below the stomach that perhaps unfettered capitalism is not the benevolent force for good we are constantly assured it is, and frequent attacks of calling for Something to Be Done. The best remedy is invariably a stiff dose of domestic crisis.

Nicholas Drayson

I have lived to thank God that all my prayers have not been answered.

Jean Ingelow

when we are weary, we speak lovingly of dreams as if they embodied our true deisres-What we WOULD have when that which we DO have so sorely disappoints us

Anne Rice

When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth

Chinua Achebe

Man's the bad child of the universe.

James Oppenheim

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

Gustave Flaubert

There were times when it seemed the different parts of him where not all under the same management.

Russell Hoban

Mr. Buckley, let me explain it this way. And I'll do so very carefully and slowly so that even you will understand it. If I was the sheriff, I would not have arrested him. If I was on the grand jury, I would not have indicted him. If I was the judge, I would not try him. If I was the D.A., I would not prosecute him. If I was on the trial jury, I would vote to give him a key to the city, a plaque to hang on his wall, and I would send him home to his family. And, Mr. Buckley, if my daughter is ever raped, I hope I have the guts to do what he did.

John Grisham

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

George Santayana

It seems to me that when you look back at a life - yours or another's - what you see is a path that weaves into and out of deep shadow. So much is lost. What we use to construct the past is what has remained in the open, a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses. Our histories, like my father's current body, are structures built of toothpicks. So what I recall of that last summer in New Bremen is a construct of both what stands in the light and what I imagine in the dark where I cannot see.

William Kent Krueger

A hound will die for you, but never lie to you.

George R.R. Martin

In Ruth's view, they looked 'like a couple' because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them - they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever imagine such nonsense. (In part, it was because of her perverse ability to imagine anything that in this instance Ruth failed to imagine the obvious)

John Irving

I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it  will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty  lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter  beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the  casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a  glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.

Jean Genet

Life's more important than a living. So many people who make a living are making death, not life. Don't ever join them. They're the gravediggers of our civilization - The safe men. The compromisers. The moneymakers. The muddlers-through. Politics is full of them... so is businesses... so is the church. They're popular. Successful. Some of them work hard, other are slack, but all of them could tell a good story. Never where there such charming gravediggers in the world's history.

James Hilton

Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking...It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.

John Fowles

But words in a book were one thing. The true test came in battle.

George R.R. Martin

If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you.

Kamila Shamsie

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