Quotes by Novelists - Page 30

Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

Ayn Rand

1776: A declaration of the Parlement of Paris:The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.

Hilary Mantel

Few things are more deceptive than memories.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not—when they strayed from the straight and narrow it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it.

Gabriel García Márquez

You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you still don't know what haunches in the dark corners of her.

Sue Monk Kidd

All of a sudden,You seemed to beStranger than a fiction,to me.

Shillpi S Banerrji

Women get desperate, but they don't understand despair.

William Gaddis

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

Émile Zola

It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.

Kenzaburō Ōe

There was something wild about her, as if she was connected to this place but not the people.

David Metzenthen

Larine had a bright future ahead of her, but she had to learn to obey the rules before she could begin learning which could be broken and when.

Robert Jordan

His heart expanded until he was nothing but a heart. A giant pounding heart on two shaking legs walking over to her.

Suanne Laqueur

It is only fools who keep straining at high C all their lives.

Charles Dudley Warner

Therein lies the new hope—Justice, after eighteen hundred years of impotent Charity. Ah! in a thousand years from now, when Catholicism will be naught but a very ancient superstition of the past, how amazed men will be to think that their ancestors were able to endure that religion of torture and nihility!

Émile Zola

The arrogant elimination of the Djaouts of our world must nerve us to pursue our own combative doctrine, namely: that peaceful cohabitation on this planet demands that while the upholders of any creed are free to adopt their own existential absolutes, the right of others to do the same is thereby rendered implicit and sacrosanct. Thus the creed of inquiry, of knowledge and exchange of ideas, must be upheld as an absolute, as ancient and eternal as any other.

Wole Soyinka

Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.

Luigi Pirandello

To be free, a man must be free from his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

Ayn Rand

In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home. It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard. I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.

Anne Rice

I like men to behave like men. I like them strong and childish.

Françoise Sagan

Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake : he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.

Ayn Rand

Nothing in this world is hidden forever. The gold which has lain for centuries unsuspected in the ground, reveals itself one day on the surface. Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned. Fire itself leaves the confession, in ashes, of the substance consumed in it. Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes; and Love finds the Judas who betrays it by a kiss. Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.

Wilkie Collins

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

Anthony Trollope

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

Ben Lerner

A bullet leaves evidence that a mortar doesn't.

Steven Galloway

Always walk away from a fight. Then ambush.

Tim Dorsey

Each moment of the happy lover's hour is worth an age of dull and common life.

Aphra Behn

The problem with parents is that they're adults.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.

Joshua Ferris

One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.

Ayn Rand

I wish i could tell you what i feel for you... nothing seems right not even you... i wish i could ask him to make everything normal...

shivangi lavaniya

And yet many of us do it without families," Nynaeve said. "Without love, without passion beyond our own particular interests. So even while we try to guide the world, we separate ourselves from it.We risk arrogance, Egwene. We always assume we know best, but risk making ourselves unable to fathom the people we claim to serve.

Robert Jordan

What the hell is that?" he asked."Magic mushrooms.""I've always wanted to try those," he exclaimed. "They sound so cute.

Heather O'Neill

If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.

Jasper Fforde

Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you're born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.

José Saramago

Men may be linked in friendship. Nations are linked only by interests.

Rolf Hochhuth

The thing she realised in that moment, that fraction of waiting, was lost. Nothing could bring the thing back, no words could make the thing solid and visible and therefore to be coped with. Solid and visible form was what she had been seeking. I will put this into visible language.

H.D.

It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.

Joseph Conrad

I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.

William H. Gass

Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.

Gustave Flaubert

My tears brought no sense of release or relief. Their flight felt like the lightest, coldest touch of a departing lover.

Anne Giardini

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like all-embracing compassion.

Arnold Bennett

Your fear is, that if you marry Adèle, you will love her. If you have children, you will love them more than anything else in the world, more than patriotism, more than democracy. If your children grow up, and prove traitors to the people, will you be able to demand their deaths, as the Romans did? Perhaps you will, but perhaps you will not be able to do it. You’re afraid that if you love people you may be deflected from your duty, but it’s because of another kind of love, isn’t it, that the duty is laid upon you?

Hilary Mantel

Flight is the only true sensation that men have achieved in modern history.

James Dickey

I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.

Lawrence Durrell

Cursed luck! —said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, —for man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, —and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.

Laurence Sterne

She had conquered, but she had also necessarily lost much. Perhaps what she had lost was not worth keeping; but at any rate she had lost it.

William Dean Howells

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

Honoré de Balzac

Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty.

Ayn Rand

Evil is anything that goes against life, harms life, stifles life, destroys life. Evil is bringing harm to another person, inflicting unnecessary pain, suffering, or confusion. All evil comes from this. This is the root of all evil.

Anne Rice

You must take the world as you find it, with a struggle to be something more honest than those around you. Phineas, as he preached himself this sermon, declared to himself that they who attempted more than this flew too high in the clouds to be of service to men an women upon the earth

Anthony Trollope

It was a gambler's action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback.

Nevil Shute

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

John Berger

What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!

Wilkie Collins

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

John Fowles

I've tried reading the Bible. I never make it past all the talk about the firmament. The firmament is the thing, on Day 1 or 2, that divides the waters from the waters. Here you have the firmament. Next to the firmament, the waters. Stay with the waters long enough, presumably you hit another stretch of firmament. I can't say for sure: at the first mention of the firmament, I start bleeding tears of terminal boredom. I grow restless. I flick ahead. It appears to go like this: firmament, superlong middle part, Jesus. You could spend half your life reading about the barren wives and the kindled wraths and all the rest of it before you got to the do-unto-others part, which as I understand it is the high-water mark.

Joshua Ferris

His brow is seamed with line and scar;His cheek is red and dark as wine;The fires as of a Northern starBeneath his cap of sable shine.His right hand, bared of leathern glove,Hangs open like an iron gin,You stoop to see his pulses move,To hear the blood sweep out and in.He looks some king, so solitaryIn earnest thought he seems to stand,As if across a lonely seaHe gazed impatient of the land.Out of the noisy centuriesThe foolish and the fearful fade;Yet burn unquenched these warrior eyes,Time hath not dimmed, nor death dismayed.

Walter de la Mare

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

George Santayana

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

W Somerset Maugham

That would be fine,” she said “If we’re alone, we’ll leave the lamp lighted so that we can see each other, and I can holler as much as I want without anybody’s having to butt in, and you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of.

Gabriel García Márquez

When life is going according to plan, we don't stop to question our daily habits...Maybe it's time to sift through our lives.

Shirley Corder

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