Quotes by Novelists - Page 125

Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real.
John Fowles
No, not of course at all—it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, toward winter. You call that ‘of course’; but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke—that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you’re being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not ‘straight ahead’ but ‘merry-go-round’!
Thomas Mann
The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said, "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours. God made eternity. Let us escape from the despotism of time altogether." These ancient and hereditary politenesses filled Nessim with emotion.
Lawrence Durrell
In a matter of a moment the amount of sand in the upper part of the hour-glass had dwindled dramatically, the tiny grains were rushing through the opening, each grain more eager to leave then the last, time is just like people, sometimes it’s all it can do to drag itself along, but at others, it runs like a deer and leaps like a young goat, which, when you think about it, is not saying much, since the cheetah is the fastest of all the animals, and yet it has never occurred to anyone to say of another person He runs and jumps like a cheetah, perhaps because that first comparison comes from the magical late middle ages, when gentlemen went deer-hunting and no one had ever seen a cheetah running or even heard of its existence. Languages are conservative, they always carry their archives with them and hate having to be updated.
José Saramago
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
Wallace Stegner
They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I congratulate myself on not having arrived into the world until the present time. This age suits my taste.
Anne Rice
The proper, wise balancingof one's whole life may depend upon thefeasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.
Arnold Bennett
This world is out of date
Kamila Shamsie
You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.
José Saramago
If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.
Guy de Maupassant
Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.
Thornton Wilder
About time, what I really learned from studying English is: time is different with timing.I understand the difference of these two words so well. I understand falling in love with the right person in the wrong timing could be the greatest sadness in a person's entire life.
Xiaolu Guo
An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
Gustave Flaubert
Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.
Gabriel García Márquez
Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.
George R.R. Martin
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg
Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean Genet
The material world coexists alongside the ideal life, and the purest intentions are bound to the earth by ridiculous threads, but they are threads of iron and they are not easily broken.
Alexandre Dumas fils
We are the children of a womb.Yet we differentiate each other,On color, creed and the sizes of our tombs!!
Shillpi S Banerrji
Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow
Jean Rhys
You can’t expect to go both ways when you’re driving on a one-way street.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by. How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest? To even make it into the finals? Never mind that memory rigged the game, airbrushed the flaws from its contestants, while the present had to shuffle into the spotlight unaided, all pockmarked with mundanities and baggy with annoyances.
Daryl Gregory
Every impression ever made on a person from newborn babyhood onwards will contribute to the shape and texture of the imagination.
Lesley Glaister
Warden had a theory about women: For years he had been asking them to sleep with him, the ones that interested him. "Will you go to bed with me?" and they were always shocked, even the rummy barflies. Of course, they always did, but that was only later, after he had fulfilled the proper requirements of approach. No woman ever said, "Why, yes, I'd like to go to bed with you." They couldn't do it. It wasnt in them to be that honest.
James Jones
I learn my life lessons from time rather than lesser mortals.
Shivam Chaudhary
Maybe sheetrocking wasn't one of Sully's favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it'd get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years - that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it.
Richard Russo
I can't see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anything definable. It was just another happening like today's luncheon, something I got into and got out of. And it reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonably well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.
Wallace Stegner
... time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop, and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.
José Saramago
Life on the run was filled with dreams, some at night during sleep, real dreams, and some when the mind was awake but drifting. Most were terrifying, the nightmares of the shadows growing bolder and larger. Others were pleasant wishes of a rosy future, free of the past. These were rare, Patrick had learned. Life on the run was life in the past. There was no closure
John Grisham
They hate you because you act like you're better than they are...." "[they are] Four that you humiliated in the yard. Four who are probably afraid of you. I’ve watched you fight. It’s not training with you. Put a good edge on your sword, and they’d be dead meat; you know it, I know it, they know it. You leave them nothing. You shame them. Does that make you proud?
George R.R. Martin
Those who are made can be unmade.
Hilary Mantel
Nothing - not prestige, power or pride - is worth sacrificing the things that you truly want, the things that you truly love. "Don't be afraid to take time and smell the roses. Don't hesitate in seeking out those things you hold dear. Seeking them out and holding on to them. And don't ever cease standing up for what you believe in, and fighting for those things that you want. Life is too short. Do what makes you happy, regardless of how others might feel.
Brenda Jackson
People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Always put your comfortable position on the horizon. Constantly seek to achieve it but also realize you can never reach there.
Shivam
I prefer to be on the side of losers, the misunderstood or lonely people rather than writing about the strong and powerful.
Núria Añó
Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.
Andrew Sean Greer
The Sun never sets. It is we who rise think to shine.
Earle Birney
Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart
Ayn Rand
It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.
Sinclair Lewis
Tell me something that only I will ever know, was perhaps what she wanted to ask him, or, What will you remember me by? - or even, Nothing of the least importance has ever belonged to me; can you help?
Shirley Jackson
They say that, if we manage to live without too great an effort, it is entirely owing to the automatism which makes us unconscious of a great part of our movements. In order to take one single step, it seems, we displace an infinite number of muscles, and yet, thanks to this automatism, we are unaware of it. The same thing happens in our relations with other people.
Alberto Moravia
The greater part of a men who speak ill of women are speaking of a certain woman.
Rémy de Gourmont
Men, being accustomed to act on reflection themselves, are a great deal too apt to believe that women act on reflection, too. Women do nothing of the sort. They act on impulse; and, in nine cases out of ten, they are heartily sorry for it afterward.
Wilkie Collins
When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.
Andrew Sean Greer
Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.
William Makepeace Thackeray
... the best way of killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.
José Saramago
It's disconcerting to realize how little you have to say to someone who once occupied such a prominent place in your bed.
Sue Grafton
When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to "take in" the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.
May Sarton
The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.
John Irving
One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?
May Sarton
People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
Thornton Wilder
Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.
Andrew Sean Greer
From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette
Cesare Pavese
It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.
George Gissing
Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.
Gustave Flaubert
To gaze into another persons face is to do two things: to recognise their humanity and to assert your own.
Lawrence Hill
Alas, woman is faithful as long as she loves, but you demand that she be faithful without love and give herself without enjoyment. Who is cruel then, woman or man?
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
A family can be the bane of one's existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one's existence. I don't know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a large hole in my heart.
Keri Hulme