Quotes by Novelists - Page 105

Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers.
James Kelman
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
Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting.
Gustave Flaubert
Money has only a different value in the eyes of each.
William Makepeace Thackeray
If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money
William Gaddis
Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy - love which creates life?
Émile Zola
Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.
John Hersey
-Do you think it's dirty money?-All money is dirty. If it were clean nobody would want it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.
Aphra Behn
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
Gustave Flaubert
Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other.
Ayn Rand
No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
Gabriel García Márquez
Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
They scattered with no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to hold them. If music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of man’s self-abdication.
Ayn Rand
I've lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,' I said. 'Actors and musicians-they're saints to me.
Anne Rice
And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us.I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness.
Anne Rice
We will not sleep, but will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You'll see me again. But you'll never know when. Hear that shifting, ambiguous rhythm, that promise of all things possible, and the ear is on its way to being free.
Richard Powers
I made the valuable discovery that practicing wasn't a matter of time at all. It was a matter of intensity. Five minutes spent working consciously and hard at the elimination of an error, was worth five hours just playing away ignoring errors as if they hadn't happened.
Leonard Wibberley
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
George Santayana
The music as always had a dark sweet luster, but it was more than ever like an endless beginning-a theme ever building to a climax which would never come.
Anne Rice
The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man’s consciousness in action—the dance presents a stylized version of man’s body in action.
Ayn Rand
A man who hates music can't be trusted.
George R.R. Martin
There is a crack, a crack, in everything. That's how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
He quickly observed, that good sentences and excellent representations of the follies of mankind met with little regard or applause, whilst sounds, without sense, threw every body into raptures:——but 'twas the fashion of the day to be musically mad, and those who were absurd enough to prefer a rational entertainment to a flimsy opera, were poor insipid beings, without taste or enthusiasm.
Eliza Parsons
The viola and the clarinet made for an interesting pairing: we had to imagine the accompaniment of other instruments, ideally a violin and a cello.
Nicholas Christopher
I do not believe in decent women who do not know how to play the piano.
Gabriel García Márquez
That night in Cartagena he again requested the songs of his youth, some so old he had to teach them to Iturbide, who was too young to remember them. The audience slipped away as the General bled inside, and he was left alone with Iturbide beside the embers.
Gabriel García Márquez
Destiny is the music of the improbable. Were it otherwise, almost anyone could exist.
Kenneth Patchen
I did not know then that words and music are more deadly than any spear.
India Edghill
I wanted to smell the guitars. It's hard to explain but they have a smell. And the best way I could ever describe it would be to say they smell like potential. Ambition and desire. If such things had a smell.
Barbara Hall
four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love.
Gabriel García Márquez
Here are all these people, full of heartache or hatred or desire, and we all have our troubles and the school year is filled with vulgarity and triviality and consequence, and there are all these teachers and kids of every shape and size, and there's this life we're struggling through full of shouting and tears and fights and break-ups and dashed hopes and unexpected luck -- it all disappears, just like that, when the choir begins to sing. Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of brotherhood, of deep solidarity, even love, and it diffuses the ugliness of everyday life into a spirit of perfect communion.
Muriel Barbery
He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening to the pianist who was playing a piece by Granados with velvet fingers.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.
Arnold Bennett
This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.
Joseph Conrad
There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had
Alan Hollinghurst
Look, dude, you've sampled your life, mixed those sounds with a funk precedent, and established a sixteen-bar system of government for the entire rhythm nation. Set the Dj up as the executive, the legislative, and judicial branches. I mean, after listening to your beat, anything I've heard on the pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights.
Paul Beatty
I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia.
Kim Stanley Robinson
There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.
Carl Sandburg
I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.
Gabriel García Márquez
Rush-hour on the A rain. A blind man staggers forth, his cane tapping lightlyown the aisle. He leans against the door,raises a violin to chin, and says I’m sorry to bother you, folks. But please. Just listen. And it kills me, the word sorry. As if something like musicshould be forgiven. He nuzzles into the wood like a lover, inhales, and at the first slow stroke, the crescendo seeps through our skin like warm water, we who have nothing but destinations, who dream of light but descend into the mouths of tunnels, searching. Beads of sweat fall from his brow, making dark roseson the instrument. His head swooning to each chord exhaled through the hollow torso. The woman beside me has put down her book, closed her eyes, the babyhas stopped crying, the cop has sat down, and I know this train is too fast for dreaming, that these iron jaws will always open to swallow a smile already lost.How insufficient the memory, to fail before death.how will hear these notes when the train slides into the yard, the lights turned out, and the songlingers with breaths rising from empty seats? I know I am too human to praise what is fading. But for now, I just want to listen as the train fillscompletely with warm water, and we are all swimming slowly toward the man with Mozart flowing from his hands. I want nothingbut to put my fingers inside his mouth, let that prayer hum through my veins. I want crawl into the hole in his violin.I want to sleep there until my flesh becomes music.
Ocean Vuong
For the music to be over so soon. For the music to be over when it had just begun. That was really sad.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Music is only love looking for words.
Lawrence Durrell
He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto--or the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second. Men have not found the words for it, nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don’t help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers--show me yours--show me that it is possible--show me your achievement--and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.
Ayn Rand
...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.
Guy de Maupassant
She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.
Ayn Rand
That stunning fuckin’ smile. I ain’t ever seen you smile in the whole time you’ve been at the compound.”I lost my smile, then replied, “Because I do not have reason to smile very often.”Ky’s fingers began tracing the back of my hand. “Then you make a reason, Li. Don’t make excuses for living a shit life. It ain’t rocket science. You don’t like something, find something you do. Don’t like being around someone, stay the fuck away. Wanna change your life, then get off your ass, bitch and fuckin’ change it.
Tillie Cole
To have luck and fail to act on it is tantamount to not having luck at all. In fact, it was worse. Barnes thought back to his self-help manuals. They all proclaimed with compelling force the necessity of recognizing opportunity then seizing it when it stuck.
Joseph G. Peterson
Everybody thinks some people are born with the "gift of gab" and some people aren't. But the truth is there is no "gift of gab." People who are good at conversation just know a few simple skills that anyone can learn.
Alan Garner
Family ... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
August Strindberg
But in those solitary Masses they began to be aware that once again they were mistresses of their fate, after having renounced not only their family name but their own identity in exchange for a security that was no more than another of a bride's many illusions. They alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved to distraction, who perhaps loved them but whom they had to continue nurturing until his last breath as if he were a child, suckling him, changing his soiled diapers, distracting him with a mother's tricks to ease his terror at going out each morning to face reality. And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. (4.113)
Gabriel García Márquez
He opened his heart to me. He wasn't afraid to show me his weakness. It was a remarkable thing, in that time, for a man to do that. That's the key thing about a strong marriage. It gives you a safe place to be yourself, entirely, even the weak parts.
Shilpi Somaya Gowda
It was a dark story.
Joseph Conrad
In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame.
Anthony Powell
For the crown of our life as it closesIs darkness, the fruit there of dust;No thorns go as deep as the rose's,And love is more cruel than lust.Time turns the old days to derision,Our loves into corpses or wives;And marriage and death and divisionMake barren our lives.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Innocence and experience make for a perfect marriage.
George R.R. Martin
Hard hands and no sense of humor makes for a bad marriage.
George R.R. Martin
As long as he lived, it would always be a pleasure and a gift to fill his hands with the weight of her flesh.
Yaa Gyasi
Before marriage she thought hserself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.
Gustave Flaubert
She clung to her husband. And it was just at the time when he needed her most, because he suffered the disadvantage of being ten years ahead of her as he stumbled alone through the mists of old age, with the even greater disadvantage of being a man and weaker than she was. In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts without intending to, or the ridiculous accident of one of them anticipating in public what the other was going to say. Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.
Gabriel García Márquez