Quotes by Novelists - Page 124

Be careful you don't cut yourself. The edges are sharp enough to shave with.''Girls don't shave', Arya said.'Maybe they should. Have you ever seen the septa's legs?
George R.R. Martin
I can't look at everything hard enough!
Thornton Wilder
But when they changed their plans time and time again, the dates became confused, the periods were mislaid, and one day seemed so much like another that one could not feel them pass.
Gabriel García Márquez
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
Be careful you don't cut yourself. The edges are sharp enough to shave with.''Girls don't shave', Arya said.'Maybe they should. Have you ever seen the septa's legs?
George R.R. Martin
I can't look at everything hard enough!
Thornton Wilder
But when they changed their plans time and time again, the dates became confused, the periods were mislaid, and one day seemed so much like another that one could not feel them pass.
Gabriel García Márquez
Perhaps with age came a more sedate appreciation of the passage of time.
Tim Lebbon
The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person's dreams have a temporal scope of ten, thirty, sometimes sixty years or even surpass all limits of man's ability to experience time--dreams, that is, whose imaginary time span vastly exceeds their actual duration and which are characterized by an incredible diminishment of the experience of time, with images thronging past so swiftly that, as one hashish-smoke puts it, the intoxicated user's brain seems "to have something removed, like the mainspring from a broken watch.
Thomas Mann
The clock sweats out each minuteof what meat is left to us.
Joseph Bathanti
For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world – legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea – scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outwards like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seeminly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.
Anthony Powell
He was thinking what a long and wide thing time is, to have so many happenings in it.
Russell Hoban
Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg
Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is.
Arnold Bennett
And there is neither beginning nor end, nor past nor future; there is only a present, at the same time static and ephemeral, multiple and absolute. It is the vital ocean in which we all share, according to our strength, our needs or our desires.
Rémy de Gourmont
The passing time is painful. I have lost the art of moving simply, naturally, within it. I am swept back against its flow. Angry, vindictive, it pierces me all the time, all the time with its spikes.
David Grossman
I don't think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time—
Joseph Conrad
Time is funny lately, nothing to do with clocks.
Victor Lodato
Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
All you have to do is choose the right day, the right weather, and you come upon a hidden place in the morning light where time stopped long before you were born
John Burnside
The worst pain ... isn't the pain you feel at the time, it's the pain you feel later on when there's nothing you can do about it, They say that time heals all wounds, But we never live long enough to test that theory ...
José Saramago
Work on." Work as if every time you started with and every time you finish.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch