Quotes by Novelists - Page 6

You have made a place in my heart where I thought there was no room for anything else. You have made flowers grow where I cultivated dust and stones. Remember this, on this journey you insist on making. If you die, I will not survive you long.

Robert Jordan

Sarah...loved the way the light lit the silence first thing in the morning.

Niamh Boyce

Ours is the country where in order to sell your product you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.

Louis Kronenberger

Anybody who thinks there's nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. If there is a God who created this world, he should scrap it and try again.

Athol Fugard

That’s what getting old is: When you can no longer bear the consequences of being wrong.

Matthew Woodring Stover

About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.

Robert Graves

Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

Langston Hughes

Un paraíso conseguido sin esfuerzo no entusiasma al creyente.

Pío Baroja

Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

George Santayana

She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.

Gabriel García Márquez

I'll never fall in love again," he once confessed to José Palacios, the only human being with whom he ever permitted himself that sort of confidence. "It's like having two souls at the same time.

Gabriel García Márquez

The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that - an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness.

Sue Monk Kidd

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.

George Sand

He said: 'You don't understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said—that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too. It took us a long time to understand that in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule.

Amitav Ghosh

There is a large stock on hand; but somehow or other, nobody's experience ever suits us but our own.

Letitia Landon

He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.

John Fowles

While I was an honorable man in her eyes, she did not love me. But the minute she understood what I was, when she breathed the true and foul odor of my soul, love was born in her – for she does love me! Well, well! There is nothing real, then, except evil.

Octave Mirbeau

Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

John Hersey

...man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey...

Ayn Rand

But whatever any of them thought one thing was always certain: even though they suffered and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness they were beaten down and met with disappointment again and again—their lives were not available for use as an illustration. Theirs were not stories that could be read as an affirmation of another system.

Nadeem Aslam

Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.

W Somerset Maugham

Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.

Luke Davies

Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.

François Mauriac

Never test another man by your own weakness.

Joseph Conrad

Dumbfounded, I stood before the court, trying to figure out if there was a state of being between “guilty” and “innocent.” Why were those my only alternatives? I thought. Why couldn’t I be “neither” or “both”? After a long pause, I finally faced the bench and said, “Your Honor, I plead human.

Paul Beatty

You don't win a game by hitting the ball out of the court.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

And then heard Detective Ryan’s pleased voice talking about Eli, about killers who’ve gone free: “They have to tell,” he’d saidWell, apparently so.But why? What is it that comes from the telling?Some of it must be relief, of course. A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight.It seems as we need someone to know us as we are—with all we have done—and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone’s sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please

Sue Miller

He checked his parachute and launched himself into the Sea of Sarcasm.--Havana Red

Leonardo Padura

Come on! Think of Miandad hitting that six off Sharma. If he could do that, you can do this.

Kamila Shamsie

He restrained himself from another wisecrack, infinitesimally but with great effort attempting to close down his nightclub approach to education; every positive change in his life, every minute increment in character, acquired more or less through shame.

Richard Price

Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect

George Sand

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

John Fowles

she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.

Alan Hollinghurst

I really admired Cesar Chavez and Gandhi, but my form of activism would have to be the written word, not the empty stomach. My parents had brought my family t the United States because of the fear of empty stomachs.

Josefina López

Her movements were so stealthy that she seemed to be an invisible creature. Frightened by her strange nature, her mother had hung a cowbell around the girl's wrist so she would not lose track of her in the shadows of the house.

Gabriel García Márquez

Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.

Edward St. Aubyn

Up and down," Meera would sigh sometimes as they walked, "then down and up. Then up and down again. I hate these stupid mountains of yours, Prince Bran.""Yesterday you said you loved them.""Oh, I do. My lord father told me about mountains, but I never saw one till now. I love them more than I can say."Bran made a face at her. "But you just said you hated them.""Why can't it be both?" Meera reached up to pinch his nose."Because they're different," he insisted. "Like night and day, or ice and fire.""If ice can burn," said Jojen in his solemn voice, "then love and hate can mate. Mountain or marsh, it makes no matter. The land is one.""One," his sister agreed, "but over wrinkled.

George R.R. Martin

Defying the Dark One no matter the length of his shadow. We will live, that defiance said. We will love and we will hope.

Robert Jordan

Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic," Richard told me. "And anyone named Heathcliff should make you suspicious.

John Irving

In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities – why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel.

Walter de la Mare

Your life, your achievement, your happiness, your person are of paramount importance. Live up to your highest vision of yourself no matter what the circumstances you might encounter. An exalted view of self-esteem is a man's most admirable quality.

Ayn Rand

He was in that stage of love–and of liquor–where one is completely taken up with oneself, and can get along very well without the other party.

Françoise Sagan

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.

W Somerset Maugham

A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else.

John D. MacDonald

They soon lost interest in Sofya. She was just one more prisoner -with no more idea of her destination than anyone else. No one asked her name and patronymic; no one remembered her surname. She realized with surprise that although the process of evolution had taken millions of years, these people had needed only a few days to revert to the state of cattle, dirty and unhappy, captive and nameless.

Vasily Grossman

If I lie down on my bed I must be here,But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.

Stevie Smith

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned.His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it…Life is the reward of virtue- and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy- a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your won destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but using your mind’s fullest power.Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seek nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing bu rational actions.The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trade…A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.

Ayn Rand

We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive - survive the condemnations, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things - they look small enough sometimes too - by which some of us are totally and completely undone.

Joseph Conrad

Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Make no choice, and you have chosen. Failure to decide, because you lack the right, is itself a decision, First Councilor. In abstaining, you vote.

George R.R. Martin

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

At last she sighed."But the most wretched thing — is it not? — is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.

Gustave Flaubert

A house can have integrity, just like a person,' said Roark, 'and just as seldom.

Ayn Rand

Consciousness is a born hermit.

George Santayana

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

José Saramago

Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day, and she would listen to every sound, spring to her feet, feel surprised that it had not come; then at sunset, always more sorrowful, she would wish the next day were already there.

Gustave Flaubert

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers.

George Meredith

For great changes in the human mind are terrible. As we realize them we realize the limitless possibilities of sinister deeds that lie hidden in every human being. A little child that loves a doll can become an old, crafty, secret murderer. How horrible! And perhaps it is still more horrible to think that, while the human envelope remains totally unchanged, every word of the letter within may become altered, and a message of peace fade into a sentence of death.

Robert S. Hichens

It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it.

W Somerset Maugham

... as a reminder that a white man could still kill him for nothing.

Yaa Gyasi

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