Quotes by Novelists - Page 100

It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
Jean Genet
No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe one is saved.
Anne Rice
Imagination, like reality, has its limits.
Tim O'Brien
Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.
Carlos Fuentes
Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.
Jasper Fforde
We cuss them because we're not good enough for them. We hate them because they wouldn't look at us, couldn't be bothered to give us an interview. I guess there's a Trent & Brent in every city, in every field. I didn't make it and I don't belong, so I'll just go through life hating them.
John Grisham
Harsh justice is still justice.
George R.R. Martin
It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror.
Jean Lorrain
Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be, like the reality of yesterday, an illusion tomorrow.
Luigi Pirandello
Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.
Wilkie Collins
You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.
John Fowles
Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore
Leonard Cohen
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
Shirley Jackson
Right then, in a nutshell: this one hasn't a single bone of obedient-little-wife material in her heavenly body.''Hasn't she? Then what kind of bone does your expertise detect?'Fermin came closer, adopting a confidential tone. 'The passionate kind,' he said, raising his eyebrows with an air of mystery. 'And you can be sure I mean that as a compliment.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The fire, baby. It'll burn us both. There's no place in this world for our kind of fire. My warrior woman. My valkyrie. You'll always be mine. Always. And never.
Frank Miller
I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.
Ayn Rand
How true is the observation that unrequited love turns to deepest hate.
Samuel Richardson
Then I made her understand that, where she was concerned, I was only a poor dog, ready to die for her. But that she could marry the young man she pleased because she had cried with me, and mingled her tears with mine. ~ Erik
Gaston Leroux
Anything you like; anything I like... No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us
Jean Rhys
The man up there raged aloud in two languages, and with a sincerity in his fury that almost convinced me I had, in some way, sinned against the harmony of the universe
Joseph Conrad
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
Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which on hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum.
W Somerset Maugham
I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
I would love to become a poor writer as per my choice then a billionaire businessman as per them...
shivangi lavaniya
Is it not rather the touch of Love, of Love the Mysterious, who seeks constantly to unite two beings, who tries his strength the instant he has put a man and a woman face to face?
Guy de Maupassant
Photography is not about costly cameras'. It's about your huge passion and little interest in innovation.
shivangi lavaniya
...perhaps, also this short embrace may infuse in their veins a little of this thrill which they would not have known without it, and will give to those two dead souls, brought to life in a second, the rapid and divine sensation of this intoxication, of this madness which gives to lovers more happiness in an instant than other men can gather during a whole lifetime.
Guy de Maupassant
And I saw her as a sad thirtieth child of Valentine that fell, not as Lucifer rebelling against God, but because she too passionately wanted to be united with him! All things in excess become sin.
Lawrence Durrell
It is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion. [An anarchist]
Joseph Conrad
What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest.
Wallace Stegner
She asked him to come and see her that night. He agreed, in order to get away, knowing that he was incapable of going. But that night, in his burning bed, he understood that he had to go see her, even if he were not capable. He got dressed by feel, listening in the dark to his brother's calm breathing, the dry cough of his father in the next room, the asthma of the hens in the courtyard, the buzz of the mosquitoes, the beating of his heart, and the inordinate bustle of a world that he had not noticed until then, and he went out in the sleeping street.
Gabriel García Márquez
He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.
W Somerset Maugham
I am in love with you', I responded.He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh.'Of course you are,' he replied. 'I understand perfectly because I'm in love with myself. The fact that I'm not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control.'It was my turn to laugh.
Anne Rice
The capacity of passion is both cruel and divine
George Sand
This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
Thornton Wilder
For passion, like crime does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life. It welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world, for passion sees in such a disorder a vague hope of finding advantage for itself.
Thomas Mann
And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
Gustave Flaubert
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
You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood...
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
I would rather die of passion than of boredom.
Émile Zola
You can never know everything, and part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of courage lies in going on anyway.
Robert Jordan
Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?”“That is the only time a man can be brave,
George R.R. Martin
To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare -- where others lack the courage-- to plunge again into the elemental.
Thomas Mann
…having once seen him put forth his strength in battle, methinks I could know him again among a thousand warriors. He rushes into the fray as if he were summoned to a banquet. There is more than mere strength--there seems as if the whole soul and spirit of the champion were given to every blow which he deals upon his enemies. God assoilzie him of the sin of bloodshed! It is fearful, yet magnificent, to behold how the arm and heart of one man can triumph over hundreds.
Walter Scott
and when i look at prime minister mrnarendra modi .i realize nothing in this world isunachievable.if you have the will you will yourselfmake the way.
shivangi lavaniya
Monsieur Foinet got up and made as if to go, but he changed his mind, and, stopping, put his hand on Philip's shoulder."But if you were going to ask me my advice, I should say: take your courage in both hands and try your luck at something else. It sounds very hard, but let me tell you this: I would give all I have in the world if someone had given me that advice when I was your age and I had taken it."Philip looked up at him with surprise. The master forced his lips into a smile, but his eyes remained grave and sad."It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it's too late. It does not improve the temper."He gave a little laugh as he said the last words and quickly walked out of the room.
W Somerset Maugham
Only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.
William Kennedy
Everything is possible for him who possesses courage and activity,'' she said, with a look resembling one of those heroines of the age of chivalry, whose encouragement was wont to give champions double valour at the hour of need; ``and to the timid and hesitating, everything is impossible, because it seems so.
Walter Scott
WHAT I'M TELLING YOU IS, IF YOU WANT TO DO THINGS YOUR OWN WAY, YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO MAKE A DECISION - YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO FIND A LITTLE COURAGE.
John Irving
Henry knew sin was a challenge to life; not an act of unreason, but an act of courage and determination.
John Fowles
Let the man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim. Attacking is his only secret. Dare, and the world always yields: or, if it beat you sometimes, dare again, and it will succumb.
William Makepeace Thackeray
So she became a woman who held her head high, not in arrogance, or contempt, but because she knew that it was a form of cowardice to make a choice and then pretend you didn’t really make it
Kamila Shamsie
Come on! Think of Miandad hitting that six off Sharma. If he could do that, you can do this.
Kamila Shamsie
Courage is nothing to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what they do is proper. Proper courage is wise courage. It's acting wisely, acting wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is the endurance of the soul in spite of fear - wisely.
Tim O'Brien
It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that’s the sin that can’t be forgiven--that I hadn’t done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there’s no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain--and wasted pain...why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage.
Ayn Rand
It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.
Xiaolu Guo
Some people have more guts than brains.
John Grisham
To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults.
W Somerset Maugham