Quotes by Novelists - Page 7

our two postcard hearts were frightened in unison under the tenacious look of the unfathomable old man who kept on eating one banana after another

Gabriel García Márquez

Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that's ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.

Anne Rice

No one ought even to desert a woman after throwing her a heap of gold in her distress! He ought to love her forever! You are young, only twenty-one, and kind and upright and fine. You'll ask me how a woman can take money from a man. Oh, God, isn't it natural to share everything with the one we owe all our happiness to? When one has given everything, how can one quibble about a mere portion of it? Money is important only when feeling has ceased. Isn't one bound for life? How can you foresee separation when you think someone loves you? When a man swears eternal love--how can there be any separate concerns in that case?

Honoré de Balzac

...she was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quiet easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people's shit in buckets on his head.

Chinua Achebe

Every misogynist came out of a woman.

Mat Johnson

Altruism holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only moral justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty. The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man's life and work belong to the state - to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation - and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

Ayn Rand

... history - the lamp which illumines national character...

Lawrence Durrell

We are born crying, and for good reason,' he reflected. 'And the rest of our lives is bound to be a muted reiteration of that cry.

Françoise Sagan

He could see perfectly well that "it," his life, was leading nowhere, that he wss behaving like a miser who hoards gold simply for the pleasure of looking at it, except that in his case it wssn't gold but experience, which was the one thing he took from life. And yet experience, unless applied to something, is just like that hoard of gold, for it neither produces nor bears fruit and is utterly useless. There is no point in a man accumulating experience the way someone else might collect stamps.

José Saramago

She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well.

Alan Hollinghurst

Be calm. God awaits you at the door.

Gabriel García Márquez

You don't know what thirst is until you drink for the first time.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

England was a cold, backward, rebellious little kingdom. It's king: Henry the Eighth, remembered principally for his six wives and the chicken legs clutched in his fat fists.

Kage Baker

It seemed like an original act, the very kindest act of being human, that he listened.

Sue Woolfe

The past is fractal premonition, infinite to the eye but nothing to be built on . . .

Lawrence Krauser

When you have no future, you live in the past.

John Grisham

The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

If you say I hide things because I'm shy, that can't be right. I've finally realized it's for a different reason-- that I don't want to see the darkness that lies in my heart

Natsuo Kirino

Have you ever noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get?

Sue Monk Kidd

It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

Matthew Woodring Stover

It was there, in particular, that I confirmed the truth that love, which we cry up as the source of our pleasures, is nothing more than an excuse for them.

Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos

When indeed you positively press your face, so to speak, against the crystalline window of your eyes, your mind is apt to become a perfect vacuum.("Out Of The Deep")

Walter de la Mare

This is neither the time nor the place, however, to ponder how often the soul, in order to be able to boast of a clean body, has burdened itself with sadness, envy, and impurity.

José Saramago

So long as one does not despair so long as one doesn't look upon life bitterly things work out fairly well in the end.

George Moore

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

Margaret Drabble

The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.

Anthony Powell

Now or never was the time.

Laurence Sterne

Writing when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

Laurence Sterne

It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone, and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realize that you're no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres or a bed of white roses leading to the altar. The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh - a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I have come here not to find answers, but to find a way to live in a world without any.

Sue Monk Kidd

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

C.P. Snow

In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark.

Hilary Mantel

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one no less wise to balance it.

George Santayana

The day my father came to claim me, my mother did not wish for me to go. ‘She is a girl,' she said, ‘and I do not think that she is yours. I had a thousand other men.' He tossed his spear at my feet and gave my mother the back of his hand across the face, so she began to weep. ‘Girl or boy, we fight our battles,' he said, ‘but the gods let us choose our weapons.' He pointed to the spear, then to my mother's tears, and I picked up the spear.

George R.R. Martin

He knew how to handle pain. You had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain like with cold water until you finally got up your nerve to take yourself in hand. Then you took a deep breath and dove in and let yourself sink down it clear to the bottom. And after you had been down inside pain a while you found that like with cold water it was not nearly as cold as you had thought it was when your muscles were cringing themselves away from the outside edge of it as you moved around it trying to get up your nerve. He knew pain.

James Jones

Esteem for the army - never in this country regarded, in the continental manner, as a popular expression of the national will - implies a kind of innocence.

Anthony Powell

Believe me, you're going to have to do much worse than this--in the pursuit of freedom, the innocents will suffer--and at your hands.

Jasper Fforde

so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos...So ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack in everythingThat’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.

William Dean Howells

I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.

Ayn Rand

He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.

Gustave Flaubert

He was invaded by an unreasoning calm, which he interpreted as an omen that nothing new was going to happen, that everything he had done in his life had been in vain, that he could not go on: it was the end.

Gabriel García Márquez

It is very seldom that one encounters what would appear to be sheer unadulterated evil in a human face; an evil, I mean, active, deliberate, deadly, dangerous. Folly, heedlessness, vanity, pride, craft, meanness, stupidity - yes. But even Iagos in this world are few, and devilry is as rare as witchcraft. ("Bad Company")

Walter de la Mare

Dr Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed.

Gabriel García Márquez

The human heart is my school.

Anne Rice

He crept up, and touched the face of the boy. "Didst thou dream that I should be faithless and forsake thee? I— a dog?" said that mute caress.

Ouida

From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.

Sue Monk Kidd

... that destiny has to make many turnings before arriving anywhere, destiny alone knows what it has cost ...

José Saramago

... secrecy adds a charm to an amour ...

Frederick Marryat

Can a man still be brave if he's afraid? That's the only tine a man can be brave.

George R.R. Martin

How may I hate that which I love with such intensity of passion? How should I abhor that for which my every drop of blood is boiling?

Ludwig Tieck

Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever Do noble things not dream them all day long And so make life death and that vast forever One grand sweet song.

Charles Kingsley

I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

Gustave Flaubert

After all there is but one race - humanity.

George Moore

Let his sword break and his shield shatter, Sansa thought coldly as she shoved out through the doors, let his courage fail him and every man desert him.

George R.R. Martin

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms

Guy de Maupassant

Nostalgia!" Miss Frost cried. "You´re nostalgic!" She repeated. "Just how old are you, William?" She asked."Seventeen, " I told her."Seventeen!" Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. "Well, William Abbott, if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!

John Irving

The attendance of that brother was now become like the attendance of a demon on some devoted being that had sold himself to destruction

James Hogg

Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.

Sue Grafton

I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.

Ouida

Previous 1 … 5 6 7 8 9 … 31 Next