Quotes by Authors - Page 25

Continuing to play the victim is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Blaming others for your station in life will indeed make you a victim but the perpetrator will be your own self, not life or those around you.
Bobby Darnell
Exploration! Exploring the past! We students in the camps seminar considered ourselves radical explorers. We tore open the windows and let in the air, the wind that finally whirled away the dust that society had permitted to settle over the horrors of the past. We made sure people could see. And we placed no reliance on legal scholarship. It was evident to us that there had to be convictions. It was just as evident as conviction of this or that camp guard or police enforcer was only the prelude. The generation that had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from its midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame.
Bernhard Schlink
Rationally speaking, blaming one's behavior on alcohol or drugs is like blaming the ladder by which you descended into a pit, or the staircase that took you down to a cellar, for what you found there.
Graham Joyce
To recongnize that the treachery of one member of a house does not taint all born within it
Jacqueline Carey
No one will ever blame you for trying to get it right.
Lorii Myers
You blame me for this, don't you?" he says."I don't need to. You're doing a better job.
Melina Marchetta
What trouble have you brought to my doorstep, Beka?" she asked."I don't see where blaming me for things that began months ago will be useful," I replied.
Tamora Pierce
When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate of an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote.
Tim O'Brien
Nico wasn't sure whether to kick himself or Will Solace. If he hadn’t been so distracted bickering with the son of Apollo, he would never have allowed the enemy to get so close.
Rick Riordan
there's plenty of blame to go around.
Suzanne Collins
If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness. (Monseigneur Bienvenu in _Les Miserables_)
Victor Hugo
He looks at Mr. Vacanti and the man looks back at him with somehow gentle eyes. It surprises David to see the man has gentle eyes. It surprises him, even at thirty-seven, to discover that monsters can have gentle eyes. Something is terribly wrong with a world where monsters are allowed to have gentle eyes.
Ryan David Jahn
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and bit her bottom lip. I found it to be such an erotic gesture that it aroused me. My eyes began making love to her in the dark. Unseen hands passed over her curves, quietly descending...trembling at her great beauty. I didn't even know her, but I wanted her. My gaze danced over her every curve, from her nose and lips, to her breasts and hips, surreptitiously. She had no idea of my thoughts. Shadow sex.
Rae Hachton
Are you the only human in the world then? And all of the rest of us monsters?
Catherynne M. Valente
The torment of love can transform people into wretched monsters
Mathias Malzieu
Who are the real monsters?
Beth Revis
A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.
Colson Whitehead
Being a pumpkinhead is great.""Your HEAD is a PUMPKIN.
Justin Robinson
...all these epic battles and monsters lately - but love is a tiny world and I prefer a more personal style...
John Geddes
How different this world to the one about which I used to read, and in which I used to live! This is one peopled by demons, phantoms, vampires, ghouls, boggarts, and nixies. Names of things of which I knew nothing are now so familiar that the creatures themselves appear to have real existence. The Arabian Nights are not more fantastic than our gospels; and Lempriere would have found ours a more marvelous world to catalog than the classical mythical to which he devoted his learning. Ours is a world of luprachaun and clurichaune, deev and cloolie, and through the maze of mystery I have to thread my painful way, now learning how to distinguish oufe from pooka, and nis from pixy; study long screeds upon the doings of effreets and dwergers, or decipher the dwaul of delirious monks who have made homunculi from refuse. Waking or sleeping, the image of some uncouth form is always present to me. What would I not give for a volume by the once despised 'A. L. O. E' or prosy Emma Worboise? Talk of the troubles of Winifred Bertram or Jane Eyre, what are they to mine? Talented authoresses do not seem to know that however terrible it may be to have as a neighbour a mad woman in a tower, it is much worse to have to live in a kitchen with a crocodile. This elementary fact has escaped the notice of writers of fiction; the re-statement of it has induced me to reconsider my decision as to the most longed-for book; my choice now is the Swiss Family Robinson. In it I have no doubt I should find how to make even the crocodile useful, or how to kill it, which would be still better.("Mysterious Maisie")
Wirt Gerrare
Art, like Nature, has her monsters
Oscar Wilde
It’s really kind of… well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know ‘em. We’re all beautiful.
Peter Watts
Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide a person.
Lauren DeStefano
Mais c'est renfantillage - this is childishness!' we heard de Grandin pant as we closed in and sought a chance to seize his skeleton-like antagonist. 'He who fights an imp of Satan as if he were human is a fool!'("The Man In Crescent Terrace")
Seabury Quinn
Beer gurgled through the beard. 'You see,' the young man began, 'the desert's so big you can't be alone in it. Ever notice that? It's all empty and there's nothing in sight, but there's always something moving over there where you can't quite see it. It's something very dry and thin and brown, only when you look around it isn't there. Ever see it?''Optical fatigue -' Tallant began.'Sure. I know. Every man to his own legend. There isn't a tribe of Indians hasn't got some way of accounting for it. You've heard of the Watchers? And the twentieth-century white man comes along, and it's optical fatigue. Only in the nineteenth century things weren't quite the same, and there were the Carkers.''You've got a special localized legend?''Call it that. You glimpse things out of the corner of your mind, same like you glimpse lean, dry things out of the corner of your eye. You incase 'em in solid circumstance and they're not so bad. That is known as the Growth of Legend. The Folk Mind in Action. You take the Carkers and the things you don't quite see and put 'em together. And they bite.'Tallant wondered how long that beard had been absorbing beer. 'And what were the Carkers?' he prompted politely.'Ever hear of Sawney Bean? Scotland - reign of James the First or maybe the Sixth, though I think Roughead's wrong on that for once. Or let's be more modern - ever hear of the Benders? Kansas in the 1870's? No? Ever hear of Procrustes? Or Polyphemus? Or Fee-fi-fo-fum?'There are ogres, you know. They're no legend. They're fact, they are. The inn where nine guests left for every ten that arrived, the mountain cabin that sheltered travelers from the snow, sheltered them all winter till the melting spring uncovered their bones, the lonely stretches of road that so many passengers traveled halfway - you'll find 'em everywhere. All over Europe and pretty much in this country too before communications became what they are. Profitable business. And it wasn't just the profit. The Benders made money, sure; but that wasn't why they killed all their victims as carefully as a kosher butcher. Sawney Bean got so he didn't give a damn about the profit; he just needed to lay in more meat for the winter.'And think of the chances you'd have at an oasis.''So these Carkers of yours were, as you call them, ogres?''Carkers, ogres - maybe they were Benders. The Benders were never seen alive, you know, after the townspeople found those curiously butchered bodies. There's a rumor they got this far West. And the time checks pretty well. There wasn't any town here in the 80s. Just a couple of Indian families - last of a dying tribe living on at the oasis. They vanished after the Carkers moved in. That's not so surprising. The white race is a sort of super-ogre, anyway. Nobody worried about them. But they used to worry about why so many travelers never got across this stretch of desert. The travelers used to stop over at the Carkers, you see, and somehow they often never got any further. Their wagons'd be found maybe fifteen miles beyond in the desert. Sometimes they found the bones, too, parched and white. Gnawed-looking, they said sometimes.''And nobody ever did anything about these Carkers?''Oh, sure. We didn't have King James the Sixth - only I still think it was the First - to ride up on a great white horse for a gesture, but twice there were Army detachments came here and wiped them all out.''Twice? One wiping-out would do for most families.'Tallant smiled at the beery confusion of the young man's speech.'Uh-huh, That was no slip. They wiped out the Carkers twice because you see once didn't do any good. They wiped 'em out and still travelers vanished and still there were white gnawed bones. So they wiped 'em out again. After that they gave up, and people detoured the oasis.("They Bite")
Anthony Boucher
This was in the good old days, when monsters were fantasy.
Hollis Seamon
Solomon breathed a sigh of relief ever so slightly, thankful that the cricket had not been eaten. Not that he was concerned for the cricket being eaten. No, he was simply relieved that the voice in the closet, which could be a monster, had not eaten it. If the voice had eaten the cricket, that meant that he was a monster that eats things in the night, and Solomon too could be eaten. Being eaten by a closet monster was perhaps the scariest thing that could happen to an elephant, not to mention a cricket, as far as Solomon was concerned.
Michael Delaware
Human beings are no damn good,” he said. “We are even worse than animals. We like ...”He trailed off, cleared his throat, but his voice hardly reached a whisper.“We like monsters,” he said.
Victor LaValle
Monsters’ can help us by giving a tangible form to our secret fears. It is less widely appreciated today that ‘wonders’ such as the unicorn legitimize our hopes. But all imaginary animals, to some degree all animals, are ultimately both monsters and wonders, which assist us by deflecting and absorbing our uncertainties . It is hard to tell ‘imaginary animals’ from symbolic, exemplary, heraldic, stylized, poetic, literary, or stereotypical ones. What is reality? Until we answer that question with confidence, a sharp differentiation between real animals and imaginary ones will remain elusive. There is some yeti in every ape, and a bit of Pegasus in every horse. Men and women are not only part angel and part demon, as the old cliché goes; they are also part centaur, part werewolf, part mandrake, and part sphinx.
Boria Sax
I can turn into anything," he said with emphasis. "Even another werewolf." When Daisy blinked back at him, too dumbfounded to speak, Talent laughed, heartily. She'd been correct. He was devastating when he truly smiled. "Haven't you learned, woman? You've fallen off the map. Here there be monsters.
Kristen Callihan
I cannot be assured ofexactly what I createdbe it madness and monsteror beauty and light.
Stephanie Hemphill
What if it turns out there really are witches and vampires and werewolves living right here alongside us? After all, what better disguise could there be than to get your image enshrined in the culture of the mass media? Anything that's described in artistic terms and shown in the movies stops being frightening and mysterious. For real horror you need the spoken word, you need an old grandpa sitting on a bench, scaring the grandkids in the evening: 'And then the Master of the house came to him and said: "I won't let you go, I'll tie you up and bind you tight and you'll rot under the fallen branches!"' That's the way to make people wary of anomalous phenomena! Kids sense that, you know–it's no wonder they love telling stories about the Black Han and the Coffin on Wheels. But modern literature, and especially the movies, it all just dilutes that instinctive horror. How can you feel afraid of Dracula, if he's been killed a hundred times? How can you be afraid of aliens, if our guys always squelch them? Yes, Hollywood is the great luller of human vigilance. A toast–to the death of Hollywood, for depriving us of a healthy fear of the unknown!
Sergei Lukyanenko
I’m always looking for the monster. Not even just in horror. I want them in everything. Just give me the monsters. Logical conclusions don’t satisfy. Monsters satisfy, absolutely.
Victor LaValle
Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears.
Catherynne M. Valente
Monsters can live inside a person. Sometimes, they know about it. More often, they don’t. The monster makes them feel safe, or at the very least, better. As long as you know it’s there, you can co-exist with it. Give it what it wants, and it will return the favor. Other times, the monster takes over.Bares its teeth.
Nikki Rae
Monsters are very real. But they're not just creatures. Monsters are everywhere. They're people. They're nightmares...They are the things that we harbor within ourselves. If you remember one thing, even above remembering me, remember that there is not a monster dreamt that hasn't walked once within the soul of a man.
C. Robert Cargill
She was torn between the impulse to run and the urge to curl up like a pill bug, close her eyes, tuck her head beneath her arms, and play the game of since-I-can't-see-monsters-monsters-can't-see-me.
Holly Black
You make them sound human.""Aren't they? A lot of monsters are human."She couldn't argue with that.
Jeyn Roberts
I pictured love as a big hairy giant with a dead fish in his mouth. Grizzly bear claws and his heart half out of his chest cause it’s too big and the lungs have to fit. He never stops walking. Over mountains. Through the desert. On top of icy lakes. Past huge cities. And he hunts and kills for you and always comes back with plenty to eat.
Adam Rapp
There are no monsters, Doctor,' she spluttered.Yeah, There are,' he said. 'Some of them are just better at hiding than others. And then there are the ones we wouldn't know if we saw them.
Steve Lyons
The less you knew, the fewer monsters you’d attract,
Rick Riordan
I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.
Teju Cole
Sanji: That's right he's a rubberman Chopper: What do you mean?Sanji: I mean he's a monster
Sanji
The world is as I always intuited it to be: weird, fractured and full of monsters.
Charlie Human
I don't remember a single monster before I met you.' he'd told Amphibian. 'Now they seem to be all over the place.''You mean there wasn't anything you were afraid of?' the Amphibian had asked him.'lots.''What did they look like?'It was a funny question.'They didn't look like anything. They were ideas,' Tom told him. 'Like not being able to pay rent, or being lonely.''That's the most terrifying thing I've ever heard.' the Amphibian replied.
Andrew Kaufman
I’d gone with my usual option. I was running through long tunnels filled with demons and monsters and nightmares, because it was easier than going to the gym.
Jim Butcher
Monster or not, he was risking his neck to save her.
Ilsa J Bick
To say that I wished I wasn't there would be a ludicrous understatement, but I'd only ever had the illusion of choice: We have to do this, Hank had said. It's for Ellis. To refuse would have been an act of calculated cruelty. And so, because of my husband's war with his father and their insane obsession with a mythical monster, we'd crossed the Atlantic at the very same time a real madman, a real monster, was attempting to take over the world for his own reasons of ego and pride.
Sara Gruen
She's in the club. The hopelessly-outnumbered-and-surrounded-by-monsters club.
M.R. Carey
It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such. The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry ‘Monster!’ and looked behind him
Laini Taylor
Monsters are born of pain, and grief, and loss, and anger. Your heart is full of them.--"And?"And it makes you vulnerable.
Jim Butcher
The reason Armand Gamache could go there was because it wasn't totally foreign to him. He knew it because he’d seen his own burned terrain, he’d walked off the familiar and comfortable path inside his own head and heart and seen what festered in the dark. And one day Jean Guy Beauvoir would look at his own monsters, and then be able to recognize others. And maybe this was the day and this was the case. He hoped so.
Louise Penny
On old maps, cartographers would draw strange beasts around the margins and write phrases such as "Here be dragons." That's where monsters exist: in the unmapped spaces, in the places where we haven't filled in all the gaps...
Kelly Link
He had found his monsters, and now was the time to leave them behind.
Tim Lebbon
If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one.
Margaret Atwood
God didn't create monsters. Monsters created themselves.
Karina Halle
It was possible, I saw now, to be a grotesque, to be huge and free, to wander the streets in utter freedom despite your atrocity, as long as you did it when everybody else was sealed inside their little lit boxes.Now it made sense – why monsters came out at night.
Joshua Gaylord
Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name.
Terry Pratchett
I welcome monsters into my bedand set a place for them at breakfast,leave sugar out for their coffeegoddamnI’ve always been so good at loving monsters
Fortesa Latifi
There are many monsters, oh, many!
Damon Galgut