Quotes by Novelists - Page 121

Because fear called her by her name. (Her own name, not fear’s name. Fear doesn’t have a name; it’s just the steady beat underneath a smile.)
Luisa Valenzuela
Fear walks through the City, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak.
Ayn Rand
Glossa Time goes by, time comes along,All is old and all is new;What is right and what is wrong,You must think and ask of you;Have no hope and have no fear,Waves that rise can never hold;If they urge or if they cheer,You remain aloof and cold. To our sight a lot will glisten,Many sounds will reach our ear;Who could take the time to listenAnd remember all we hear?Keep aside from all that patter,Seek yourself, far from the throng When with loud and idle clatterTime goes by, time comes along.Nor forget the tongue of reasonOr its even scales depressWhen the moment, changing season,Wears the mask of happiness -It is born of reason's slumberAnd may last a wink as true:For the one who knows its numberAll is old and all is new.Be as to a play, spectator,As the world unfolds before:You will know the heart of matterShould they act two parts or four;When they cry or tear asunderFrom your seat enjoy alongAnd you'll learn from art to wonderWhat is right and what is wrong.Past and future, ever blending,Are the twin sides of same page:New start will begin with endingWhen you know to learn from age;All that was or be tomorrowWe have in the present, too;But what's vain and futile sorrowYou must think and ask of you;For the living cannot severFrom the means we've always had:Now, as years ago, and ever,Men are happy or are sad:Other masks, same play repeated;Diff'rent tongues, same words to hear;Of your dreams so often cheated,Have no hope and have no fear.Hope not when the villains clusterBy success and glory drawn:Fools with perfect lack of lusterWill outshine Hyperion!Fear it not, they'll push each otherTo reach higher in the fold,Do not side with them as brother,Waves that rise can never hold.Sounds of siren songs call steadyToward golden nets, astray;Life attracts you into eddiesTo change actors in the play;Steal aside from crowd and bustle,Do not look, seem not to hearFrom your path, away from hustle,If they urge or if they cheer;If they reach for you, go faster,Hold your tongue when slanders yell;Your advice they cannot master,Don't you know their measure well?Let them talk and let them chatter,Let all go past, young and old;Unattached to man or matter,You remain aloof and cold.You remain aloof and coldIf they urge or if they cheer;Waves that rise can never hold,Have no hope and have no fear;You must think and ask of youWhat is right and what is wrong;All is old and all is new,Time goes by, time comes along.
Mihai Eminescu
The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest killing device of contemporary times.
Wole Soyinka
It's the fear that kills us, Leah," Jende said. "Sometimes it happens and it's not even as bad as the fear. That is what I have learned in this life. It is the fear.
Imbolo Mbue
how often fears come to sour our life and prove, in the end, to have no foundation, no reason to exist
José Saramago
Always remember this, Henri. Men trade for profit. They are driven by greed. But debt is about fear, and fear is stronger than greed. The true power, the weapon that defeats all others, is debt. Fools search for gold. The wise man studies debt. That is the key to all business.
Edward Rutherfurd
Fear is a numbing thing when there is no recourse to hope or escape...
William Horwood
Great fear can cast love out.
Olivia Manning
I told myself 'Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?
Guy de Maupassant
What people are afraid of can tell us a lot about society.
Anne Holt
In the presence of the storm, thunderbolts, hurricane, rain, darkness, and the lions, which might be concealed but a few paces away, he felt disarmed and helpless.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Amid the stillness of the night, in the depths of the ravine, from the direction in which the corpses lay suddenly resounded a kind of inhuman, frightful laughter in which quivered despair, and joy, and cruelty, and suffering, and pain, and sobbing, and derision; the heart-rending and spasmodic laughter of the insane or condemned.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
In the meantime the groans changed into the protracted, thunderous roar by which all living creatures are struck with terror, and the nerves of people, who do not know what fear is, shake, just as the window-panes rattle from distant cannonading.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of the boulevards laden with the nightly laughter of audiences leaving theaters, Madame de Burne's five years of bondage had nonetheless endowed her with a singular timidity which mingled oddly with her youthful mettle, a great fear of saying too much, of going to far, along with a fierce yearning for emancipation and a firm resolve never again to compromise her freedom.
Guy de Maupassant
Pausing on the threshold, he looked in, conscious not so much of the few familiar sticks of furniture - the trucklebed, the worn strip of Brussels carpet, the chipped blue-banded ewer and basin, the framed illuminated texts on the walls - as of a perfect hive of abhorrent memories.That high cupboard in the corner, from which certain bodiless shapes had been wont to issue and stoop at him cowering out of his dreams; the crab-patterned paper that came alive as you stared; the window cold with menacing stars; the mouseholes, the rusty grate - trumpet of every wind that blows - these objects at once lustily shouted at him in their own original tongues.("Out Of The Deep")
Walter de la Mare
This is glorious!' I cried, and then i looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said 'Yes', without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.
Joseph Conrad
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.
Joseph Conrad
All my life,I've been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid.
Anne Rice
Cruelty and fear shake hands together. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
Honoré de Balzac
Another of the hard things about being in a war, grandchildren, is that although there are times of quiet when the fighting has stopped, you know you will soon be fighting again. Those quiet times give you the chance to think about what has happened. Some of it you would rather not think about, as you remember the pain and the sorrow. You also have time to worry about what will happen when you go into battle again.
Joseph Bruchac
...we confidently say that it's not worth trying to reach any conclusions merely because we decide to stop halfway along the path that would lead us straight to them.
José Saramago
And I saw that all my life I had known that this was going to happen, and that I'd been afraid for a long time, I'd been afraid for a long time. There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.
Jean Rhys
They're all so much afraid of the Council that they're not afraid of anything else.
Richard Adams
All Welsh knew was that he was scared shitless, and at the same time was afflicted with a choking gorge of anger that any social coercion existed in the world which could force him to be here.
James Jones
I'm frightend. Of us. I want to go home. O God I to go home." "It's was an accident," said Piggy stubbornly,"and that's that." He touched Ralph's bare shoulder and Ralph shuddered at the human contact.
William Golding
His cloak was his crowning glory; sable, thick and black and soft as sin.
George R.R. Martin
Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end.
Gabriel García Márquez
What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.
Anne Rice
At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver
Gustave Flaubert
….it was a brave man’s fear. I knew what he meant. What must a brave general feel when he knows the battle has gone against him and nothing remains but death?
Anne Rice
With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.
Tim O'Brien
You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.
Jean Lorrain
The people can be forced to fear, but not to love.
Steve Berry
I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?
Guy de Maupassant
There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and the air of the streets. Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak.
Ayn Rand
Robb says the man died bravely, but Jon says he was afraid.""What do you think?" his father asked.Bran thought about it. "can a man still be brave if he's afraid?""That is the only time a man can be brave," his father told him.
George R.R. Martin
Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.
Shirley Jackson
Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.
Shirley Jackson
A cold wind was blowing from the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things.
George R.R. Martin
The man who fears losing has already lost.
George R.R. Martin
Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Oh, my sweet summer child," Old Nan said quietly, "what do you know of fear?Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feetdeep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the longnight, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little childrenare born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt andhungry, and the white walkers move through the woods
George R.R. Martin
There's no shame in fear, my father told me, what matters is how we face it.
George R.R. Martin
Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?''That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him.
George R.R. Martin
Fear cuts deeper than swords.
George R.R. Martin
I sailed up to the cold stars but they were cold no longer, and I grew bigger and bigger until I was the stars and they were me, and I was Union, and for a single solitary glittering instant I was the universe.
George R.R. Martin
I did wonder what happened when we died, though, and I'd wondered about it for most of my life. Thinking that nothing happened, that there was absolutely nothing following all of this pain, seemed just as silly as magic. No, there had to be something.
David Joy
My love for her was close to piety. You may think it strange that I should use this word, with its religious connotation, to describe my feeling towards a woman. But even now I believe—and I believe it very strongly—that true love is not so far removed from religious faith.
Sōseki Natsume
There were a couple of occasions in India when I was twenty that felt to me like going out with a thimble in your hand, hoping to catch a drop of rain, and having the ocean land on your head. These experiences convinced me that there is an absolute love that pervades everything.
David James Duncan
There is no error more absurd, and yet more rooted in the heart of man, than the belief that his sufferings will promote his spiritual safety.
Charles Robert Maturin
Every soul innately yearns for stillness, for a space, a garden where we can till, sow, reap, and rest, and by doing so come to a deeper sense of self and our place in the universe. Silence is not an absence but a presence. Not an emptiness but repletion A filling up.
Anne D. LeClaire
The worst evil is not to commit crimes, but to fail to do the good one might have done.
Léon Bloy
I believe that around us there is only one word on all sides, one immense word which reveals our solitude and extinguishes our radiance: Nothing! I believe that that word does not point to our insignificance or our unhappiness, but on the contrary to our fulfillment and our divinity, since everything is in ourselves.
Henri Barbusse
Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".
David James Duncan
The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same. It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth and the cells of our bodies, and we will lover her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds.
Sue Monk Kidd
She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art—she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the street outside—a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.
Alan Hollinghurst
Give me a book,” she said. “A book of sermons, anything.”“What do you want a book for?”“I want words. I’ve got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose.
Hilary Mantel
And once more given to inaction,Empty in spirit and alone,He settled down – to the distractionOf making other minds his own;Collecting books, he stacked a shelfful,Read, read, not even one was helpful:Here, there was dullness, there pretence;This one lacked conscience, that one sense;All were by different shackles fettered;And, past times having lost their hold,The new still raved about the old.Like women, books he now deserted,And mourning taffeta he drewAcross the bookshelf’s dusty crew.
Alexander Pushkin
... Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory
Carlos Ruiz Zafón