Quotes by Novelists - Page 104

I imagine some people, like some toys, are born defective - which I suppose makes us all broken toys, don't you think?
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Every blade of grass was carved from emerald, every drip of water turned to diamond.
George R.R. Martin
The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Mother's delusions. Now, I don't know about the true things or the not-true things, because there seem to be so many of them, but I do know about Mother's delusions, and they're solid. They range from the conviction that the waffle iron, unless watched, is going to strangle the toaster, to the delusion that electricity pours out of an empty socket onto your head, and nothing is going to change any one of them.The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. I am, this morning, endeavoring to persuade you to join me in my deluded world; it is a happy, irrational, rich world, full of fairies and ghosts and free electricity and dragons, and a world beyond all others fun to walk around in. All you have to do---and watch this carefully please--is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.
Shirley Jackson
I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have little house all by myself on the moon.
Shirley Jackson
A book can be as dangerous as a sword in the right hands
George R.R. Martin
It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn't see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.
Anne Rice
Most of my kin are bastards," [Tyrion] said with a wry smile, "but you're the first I've had to friend.
George R.R. Martin
Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again. 'May I presume to suggest,' yelled Shandy giddily to Davies, 'that we preoceed the hell out of here with all due haste.' Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. 'My dear fellow consider it done.
Tim Powers
When I was her age," Munro said to Eilidh, "I was chasing frogs."Oron Chuckled. "When I was your age, I was chasing frogs. Come. We have things to discuss.
India Drummond
Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.
Joseph Conrad
For men, the answer was always the same and never farther away than the nearest sword. For a woman, a mother, the way was stonier and harder to know.
George R.R. Martin
And yet many of us do it without families," Nynaeve said. "Without love, without passion beyond our own particular interests. So even while we try to guide the world, we separate ourselves from it.We risk arrogance, Egwene. We always assume we know best, but risk making ourselves unable to fathom the people we claim to serve.
Robert Jordan
Fancies were all very well for a change, but must be only occasional guests in a world devoted to reality.
Walter de la Mare
We are *all* we are, and all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is after all just what the old boy said – it's only the impossible that's credible; whatever credible may mean...
Walter de la Mare
The only rules he wanted to remember were "never kiss a girl whose brothers have knife scars" and "never gamble without knowning a back way out
Robert Jordan
Long are the lives of elves' he said.Short are the tempers of dwarfs,'Gotrek muttered, just loud enough to be heard.
William King
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
Don't be a fool for the Devil, darling.
Anne Rice
Anyone who claimed that old age had brought them patience was either lying or senile.
Robert Jordan
All was shattered, and all but memory lost, and one memory above all others, of him who brought the Shadow and the Breaking of the World. And him they named Dragon.
Robert Jordan
Sarcasm, as it turned out--even when it was instinctive and quick--cut into the time one had to manufacture one's escape.
Mel Odom
I'll never forget the first time Davram took me by the scruff of my neck and showed me he was the stronger of us. It was magnificent! If a woman is stronger than her husband, she comes to despise him. She has the choice of either tyrannizing him or else making herself less in order not to make him less. If the husband is strong enough, though, she can be as strong as she is, as strong as she can grow to be.
Robert Jordan
It takes real planning to organize this kind of chaos.
Mel Odom
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.
Robert Jordan
It all goes back and back," Tyrion thought, "to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance in our steads.
George R.R. Martin
We rode on the winds of the rising storm,We ran to the sounds of the thunder.We danced among the lightning bolts,and tore the world asunder.
Robert Jordan
They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to Middle Earth.
George R.R. Martin
—all I can say of the matter, is—That he has either a pumkin for his head—or a pippin for his heart,—and whenever he is dissected 'twill be found so.
Laurence Sterne
What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve about.
James Hadley Chase
I had had the job for three weeks. It was dreary. You couldn't read; they didn't like it. I would feel as if I were drugged, sitting there, watching those damned dolls, thinking what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women. Satin skin, silk hair, velvet eyes, sawdust heart - all complete.
Jean Rhys
I have carried only a few ideas out of life's storm - and not one feeling. I have long lived according to the head, not the heart. I consider and analyze my personal passions and actions with a strict curiosity, but without sympathy. There are two people within me: one who lives in the full sense of the word, and the other who reasons and judges him.
Mikhail Lermontov
When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.
Theodore Dreiser
…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
There was little Hiroko Tanaka hadn’t learnt about the shameful resilience of the human heart.
Kamila Shamsie
His heart expanded until he was nothing but a heart. A giant pounding heart on two shaking legs walking over to her.
Suanne Laqueur
He lived then before me, he lived as much as he had ever lived---a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities, a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to enter the house with me---the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshipers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum regular and muffled like the beating of a heart, the heart of a conquering darkness.
Joseph Conrad
They all said the way to a man’s heart was through his asshole.
Edmund White
Had he already inspired a passion in some stranger’s heart?
Edmund White
Maybe it wasn't a good idea to rank the people in your life. That's not how the heart worked. The heart didn't make lists.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
She knew herself the heart of a king buried in a sepulchre (in the land of his love) while the body of the king is elsewhere. My heart lies buried in there like Coeur de Lion (or whoever it was) who had his heart buried at Havre (or wherever it was) and the rest of him buried somewhere else.
H.D.
Certainly the heart has always something to tell about the future to those who listen to it. But what does the heart know? Scarce a little of what has already happened.
Alessandro Manzoni
I'll have your heart, if not by gift my knife Shall carve it out. I'll have your heart, your life.
Stevie Smith
How characteristic of your perverse heart that longs only for what happens to be out of reach.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
I will tear this folly from my heart, though every fibre bleed as I rend it away!
Walter Scott
Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.
Alphonse de Lamartine
The human heart is my school.
Anne Rice
When one woman strikes at the heart of another, she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.
Gustave Flaubert
Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.
Luigi Pirandello
From the way that people have always talked about your heart being broken, it sort of seemed to be a one-time thing. Mine seemed to break all the time.
Heather O'Neill
Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.
Gustave Flaubert
-Money? in a voice that rustled.
William Gaddis
It's easy to make money, a lot tougher to make a difference
Shilpa Menon
The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended. When each individual realises for himself that this thing primarily stands for and should only be accepted as a moral due - that it should be paid out as honestly stored energy, and not as a usurped privilege - many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed. As for Carrie, her understanding of the moral significance of money was the popular understanding, nothing more. The old definition: 'Money: something everybody else has and I must get,' would have expressed her understanding of it thoroughly. Some of it she now held in her hand - two soft, green ten-dollar bills - and she felt that she was immensely better off for the having of them. It was something that was power in itself. One of her order of mind would have been content to be cast away upon a desert island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases it could have no value. Even then she would have had no conception of the relative value of the thing; her one thought would, undoubtedly, have concerned the pity of having so much power and the inability to use it.
Theodore Dreiser
To part with money is a sacrifice beyond almost all men endowed with a sense of order. There is scarcely any man alive who does not think himself meritorious for giving his neighbour five pounds. Thriftless gives, not from a beneficent pleasure in giving, but from a lazy delight in spending. He would not deny himself one enjoyment; not his opera-stall, not his horse, not his dinner, not even the pleasure of giving Lazarus the five pounds.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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
Your husband certainly love money,' she said. 'That is no lie Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else.
Jean Rhys
Money is permission to live.
H L Humes
I tell you, money can't build your spire for you. Build it of gold and it would simply sink deeper.
William Golding
Max would conclude, "that's who I want to be. The pope. And I'll do the same thing he does. I'll keep all the goddamn money.
Richard Russo