Quotes by Novelists - Page 123

His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless; he was vain of the wider knowledge he had acquired from the perusal of so many books, his mind was alert, and he had not the skill to hide his contempt for his companions' stupidity. They complained that he was conceited; and, since he excelled only in matters which to them were unimportant, they asked satirically what he had to be conceited about. He was developing a sense of humour, and found that he had a knack of saying bitter things, which caught people on the raw; he said them because they amused him, hardly realising how much they hurt, and was much offended when he found that his victims regarded him with active dislike. The humiliations he suffered when he first went to school had caused in him a shrinking from his fellows which he could never entirely overcome; he remained shy and silent. But though he did everything to alienate the sympathy of other boys he longed with all his heart for the popularity which to some was so easily accorded. These from his distance he admired extravagantly; and though he was inclined to be more sarcastic with them than with others, though he made little jokes at their expense, he would have given anything to change places with them.
W Somerset Maugham
Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
W Somerset Maugham
You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.
Gustave Flaubert
Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.
Jasper Fforde
I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
Muriel Barbery
I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.
Jasper Fforde
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
W Somerset Maugham
No two persons ever read the same book.
Edmund Wilson
In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.
Gabriel García Márquez
Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.
George R.R. Martin
I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
George Gissing
Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books.
Jasper Fforde
Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.
Russell Banks
The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!
Wilkie Collins
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
John Berger
Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
Hilary Mantel
If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.
François Mauriac
Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.
Guy de Maupassant
The world the Citadel is building has no place in it for sorcery or prophecy or glass candles, much less for dragons.
George R.R. Martin
The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Nature in her creative dreaming, dreamt the same thing both here and there, and if one spoke of imitation, then certainly it had to be reciprocal. Should one take the children of the soil as models because they possessed the depth of organic reality, whereas the ice flowers were mere external phenomena? But as phenomena, they were the result of an interplay of matter no less complex than that found in plants. If I understood our friendly host correctly, what concerned him was the unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, the idea that we sin against the latter if the boundary we draw between the two spheres is too rigid, when in reality it is porous, since there is no elementary capability that is reserved exclusively for living creatures or that the biologist could not likewise study on inanimate models.
Thomas Mann
Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless it is the same everywhere. There are businessmen, police up there; people trade, fight, dethrone their kings.tSome shooting stars suddenly slid past, describing a course in the sky like the parabola of a monstrous rocket.t‘My Word,’ said Bouvard, ‘look at those worlds disappearing.’tPecuchet replied: ‘If our world in its turn danced about, the citizens of the stars would be no more impressed than we are now. Ideas like that are rather humbling.’t‘What is the point of it all?’t‘Perhaps there isn’t a point.’t‘Yet…’ and Pecuchet repeated the word two or three times, without finding anything more to say.
Gustave Flaubert
He pointed to another number, changing as rapidly as the first, but on a lower trajectory; it rose to a high of 8.79 rem per hour. Several lifetimes of dentists’ X-rays, to be sure; but the radiation outside the storm shelter would have been a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal they were huddled behind; hundreds of millions were flying between these atoms and then through the atoms of their bodies, touching nothing, as if they were no more than ghosts. Still, thousands were striking atoms of flesh and bone. Most of those collisions were harmless; but in all those thousands, there were in all probability one or two (or three?) in which a chromosome strand was taking a hit, and kinking in the wrong way: and there it was. Tumor initiation, begun with just that typo in the book of the self. And years later, unless the victim's DNA luckily repaired itself, the tumor promotion that was a more or less unavoidable part of living would have its effect, and there would appear a bloom of Something Else inside: cancer. Leukemia, most likely; and, most likely, death.
Kim Stanley Robinson
I remembered the old doctor, - "It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot." I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.
Joseph Conrad
Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again.
Gustave Flaubert
The crime which is done now is that war has made a tool and slave of science, and man's knowledge, painfully and laboriously compiled, is made the instrument of man's destruction.
Leonard Wibberley
Life […] is scientific, that’s what it is.
William Golding
We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast as the universe; which means endless.
Anne Rice
Science, I am told, is making great strides, experimenting, groping after things which no sane man has ever dreamed of before – without being burned alive for it.
Walter de la Mare
And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
Thomas Mann
Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist ei
John Irving
Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.
Walker Percy
Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow`s speed.
Howard Nemerov
I do not like odd things until I can understand them.
Robert Jordan
The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.
Benjamin Disraeli
Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.
Tim O'Brien
You have a mind like the rings of Saturn. A million miles wide and an inch deep.
Kim Stanley Robinson
How about this,' I said. 'We modify our plans with regard to ongoing facts as they become known to us, then remodify them as the situation unfolds. 'You mean make it all up as we go along?' asked Perkins.'Right.
Jasper Fforde
And didst thou imbibe mighty potions from the fruit of the grape (...)? And hast thou one Ache, this morning (...) appertaining unto Head, and much repentance in thy Soul forsooth?
Patrick Hamilton
We walked on the moon. We made footprints somewhere no one else had ever made footprints, and unless someone comes and rubs them out, those footprints will be there forever because there’s no wind.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
Feeling unable to maintain this detachment of attitude towards human- and, in especial, matrimonial- affairs, I asked whether it was not true that she had married Bob Duport. She nodded; not exactly conveying, it seemed to me, that by some happy chance their union had introduced her to an unexpected terrestrial paradise.
Anthony Powell
If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she desired to enjoy a character for virtue, and we know that no lady in the genteel world can possess this desideratum, until she has put on a train and feathers and has been presented to her Sovereign at Court. From that august interview they come out stamped as honest women. The Lord Chamberlain gives them a certificate of virtue.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Shaga: How would you like to die, little man?Tyrion: In my bed, at the age of eighty with a belly full of wine and a woman's mouth around my cock.
George R.R. Martin
I was so high, I needed a stepladder to scratch my own ass.
Kinky Friedman
We'll never find that one, and I'll be blamed," announced Edd Tollett, the dour grey-haired squire everyone called Dolorous Edd. "Nothing ever goes missing that they don't look at me, ever since that time I lost my horse. As if that could be helped. He was white and it was snowing, what did they expected
George R.R. Martin
Oh. My. God.’ she said, pointing out of the window. ‘Do you know what that is?’I nodded and said, ‘I think I may have seen it before.’‘That,’ said Florida, ‘is the Moonyouidiot.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
I thank God daily for the good fortune of my birth, for I am certain I would have made a miserable peasant.
C.S. Forester
...what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn't remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.
Anne Rice
But he is an Italian," was Umberto's sensible reply. "He doesn't care if you break some law a little bit, as long as you wear beautiful shoes. Are you wearing beautiful shoes? Are you wearing the shoes I gave you?...principessa?"I looked down at my flip-flops. "I guess I'm toast.
Anne Fortier
Dude, you're scaring the crap out of me,' said Nick. 'I'm serious, I literally have no crap right now.
Mark Frost
If you have the choice between humble and cocky, go with cocky. There's always time to be humble later, once you've been proven horrendously, irrevocably wrong.
Kinky Friedman
We were talking about the prince,' Sansa said, her voice soft as a kiss.Arya knew which prince she meant: Joffrey, of course. The tall, handsome one. Sansa got to sit with him at the feast. Arya had to sit with the little fat one. Naturally.
George R.R. Martin
Small men oft feel a need to prove their courage with unseemly boasts," he declared. "I doubt if he could kill a duck."Tyrion shrugged. "Fetch the duck.
George R.R. Martin
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
Honoré de Balzac
I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.
Kinky Friedman