Quotes by Novelists - Page 8

I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.

Joseph Conrad

They were our enemies. Yet in those young men of Italy I'd seen something centuries old. An American is only as old as his years. A long line of something was hidden behind the bright eyes of those Italians. And then and there I decided to learn something of the modern world. There was something abroad which we Americans couldn't or wouldn't understand. But unless we made some attempt to realize that everyone in the world isn't American, and that not everything American is good, we'll all perish together, and in this twentieth century....

John Horne Burns

Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar and the drunkard who's the benefactor of a whole city.

Thornton Wilder

Getting there, that's what's important even if you can't get back.

Thomas O'Malley

I felt at one and the same time quite close, within reach of my hand, and yet an infinite distance away, an unknown world of goodness. Often Isa had said to me: 'You, who see nothing but evil.... You, who see evil everywhere....' It was true, and it was not true.

François Mauriac

The call for political freedom took place long ago. The call for freedom of speech is also a thing of the past. Freedom is not a word to be used exclusively for phenomena such as this which are so easily given outward manifestation. I believe that we young men of the new age have encountered the moment in time when we must call for that great freedom, the freedom of the mind.

Sōseki Natsume

The perishableness of life...imparts value, dignity, interest to life.

Thomas Mann

When people go away they vanish, turn to nothing, stop being. They live only in memories, haunting the imagination.

Dezső Kosztolányi

i have a hurricane of thoughts thatsimply evolves within me andbewilder my inner soul .

shivangi lavaniya

Love is like taking a leap, Darragh. You don't know when you step off the ledge if the drop is six inches or six thousand feet. What matters is you jump.

Inda Herwood

It is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings it is the soft luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.

Ouida

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.

Herman Wouk

Stories can save us.

Tim O'Brien

There’s always a bear,

George R.R. Martin

She might have wept then, had not the sky begun to do it for her.

George R.R. Martin

The earth has its music for those who will listen.

George Santayana

Vain mistaken mortals, who, valuing themselves on names and titles, suppose that the virtues of the mind must be attached to an empty sound, when every day's experience proves that birth is disgraced, titles rendered contemptible, and riches a curse, by the vices, meanness, and dissipation of its possessors!

Eliza Parsons

People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.

W Somerset Maugham

I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

Laurence Sterne

Perspective gets lost in moral certainties. Which only means that no one was ever burned at the stake by a doubter.

Thomas H. Cook

There are beautiful things in the world and there are sad things and when they come together they make a star. The light is far away and the strangest part is that the light is inside you.

Victor Lodato

Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it’s a mistake to make a habit of it.

W Somerset Maugham

Women joked amongst themselves: 'Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It's for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past- "you were born and then I married you"- but men are fools.

Nadeem Aslam

I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker’s head if they’re not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it’s bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God’s face when it’s bitter

Gustave Flaubert

Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.

Sue Monk Kidd

...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

When they were silent for a moment the quiet weight of the house pressed down from all around them.

Shirley Jackson

It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.

Thornton Wilder

America — rather, the United States — seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warmhearted, overfriendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures. Its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The schnuckle among the nations of the world.

Edna Ferber

They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring [it] to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single world line of history. The future becoming the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential was so delicious— the way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all...time, combined magically into some superb, as-yet-unseen synthesis— or throw all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of just government. . . .To go from that to the mundane problematic...was an inevitable letdown, and instinctively people put it off.

Kim Stanley Robinson

The moon is friend for the lonesome to talk to.

Carl Sandburg

I'm sick and tired of having a forest and a torture chamber in my house... I want to have a nice quiet flat with ordinary doors and windows and a wife inside it, like anybody else!

Gaston Leroux

The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

Hilary Mantel

Unfinishedness avoids the stupidity of conclusions

Pierre Senges

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

Thomas Keneally

I take no joy in mead nor meat, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.

George R.R. Martin

He was a good boy and ‘projected’ goodness – which later would be the downfall of many a person.

Edmund White

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

Edward St. Aubyn

Women do not become exhausted they only exhaust others.

Robert Jordan

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

John Irving

Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.

John Fowles

Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.

John Irving

I was very sorry to hear about your losses. Your brother was a terrible traitor, I know, but if we start killing men at weddings they'll be more frightened of marriage than they are presently. (Olenna Tyrell to Sansa Stark

George R.R. Martin

Of Love and Other Demons (Vintage International) - Gabriel GarcÍA MÁRquez (Highlight: 5; Note: 0)-------------"Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning."(Chapter:Chapter Two)"What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you. And regarding that there can be no doubt, for it is He in His infinite diligence who has enlightened us so that we may offer you this consolation.”"(Chapter:Chapter Two)"Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses"(Chapter:Chapter Two)"Take care,” said Delaura. “Sometimes we attribute certain things we do not understand to the demon, not thinking they may be things of God that we do not understand.”"(Chapter:Chapter Three)". He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her. "(Chapter:Chapter Five)

Gabriel García Márquez

We're going' Anne said firmly. So soon?' Percy pleaded. 'But stars come out at night.'Then they fade at dawn', Anne replied. 'This star needs to veil herself in darkness.

Philippa Gregory

I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.

Jasper Fforde

It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs.

Ayn Rand

There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more

Gustave Flaubert

In the forest you may find yourself lost, without companions. You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose sight of your quarry, and forget why you are there. You may meet a dwarf, or the living Christ, or an old enemy of yours; or a new enemy, one you do not know until you see his face appear between the rustling leaves, and see the glint of his dagger. You may find a woman asleep in a bower of leaves. For a moment, before you don’t recognise her, you will think she is someone you know.

Hilary Mantel

You're looking for a reason," she said. "And that doesn't help. It doesn't change the present.

Sue Monk Kidd

Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.

Jean Rhys

Shame has poor memory.

Gabriel García Márquez

The world was created for Mankind, not for some of mankind.

Richard Llewellyn

I thought if I told no one it might not be true.

Jean Rhys

A story might help you get through your life, he said, but it doesn't literally keep you alive -- if anything, most often people who have power turn their story into a brick wall keeping out somebody else's truth, so that they can continue the life they believe themselves to be leading, trying somehow to preserve the idea that they're good people in their small lives, despite their involvement, however indirect, with bigger evils.

James Hannaham

Lost in the corn rows, I remember feeling just another stalk, and thus this country takes me over in the way I occupy myself when I am well . . . completely - to the edge of both my house and body. No one notices, when they walk by, that I am brimming in the doorways.

William H. Gass

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.

Maxwell Bodenheim

As Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions.

John Irving

They fail and they alone who have not striven.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Yet the higher a man climbs the further he has to fall.

George R.R. Martin

Previous 1 … 6 7 8 9 10 … 31 Next