Quotes by Novelists - Page 133

If only certain things had been preventable, his life would have unfurled in front of him as intended, like a lush Oriental carpet. No surprises, no detours. Just a thick tapestry of days and nights that at the end of his time on earth, he could roll up and proudly claim as his own.
Shilpa Agarwal
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
George Santayana
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
George Santayana
I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room
Gustave Flaubert
A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.
W Somerset Maugham
There are moments of despair that come sometimes, when night sets in and a white fog presses against the windows. Then our house changes its shape, rears up and becomes a place of despair. Then fear and rage run simply--and the thought of Death as a friend. This is the simplest of thoughts, that Death must come when we call, although he is a god.
Stevie Smith
It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.
Walter de la Mare
Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages
Elias Canetti
When I die, nieces, I want to be cremated, my ashes taken up in a bush plane and sprinkled onto the people in town below. Let them think my body is snowflakes, sticking in their hair and on their shoulders like dandruff.
Joseph Boyden
Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.
Herman Wouk
The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can't live without her.
Anne Rice
In fact living is dying.
Guy de Maupassant
This was how an enemy should be dealt with: with a dagger, not a declaration.
George R.R. Martin
I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.""Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?""How else? Though not till I'm done reading.
George R.R. Martin
Would that the dead were not dead! But there is grass that must be eaten, pellets that must be chewed, hraka that must be passed, holes that must be dug, sleep that must be slept.
Richard Adams
Watch birth and death:The lotus has alreadyOpened its flower.
Sōseki Natsume
a man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: where are you going, my friend? and the condemned man replied: i'm not going anywhere. they're taking me by force.
José Saramago
The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
Gabriel García Márquez
When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)
John Irving
Prate not to me of suicide, Faint heart in battle, not for pride I say Endure, but that such end denied Makes welcomer yet the death that's to be died.
Stevie Smith
Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
Thornton Wilder
It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it.
W Somerset Maugham
Please not yet. Those are the three eternal words. Please not yet.
John D. MacDonald
Fight on, brave knights! Man dies, but glory lives! Fight on; death is better than defeat! Fight on brave knights! for bright eyes behold your deeds!
Walter Scott
There is not a day or night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit's. Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not. But there is no bargain, for here, what is, is what must be.
Richard Adams
He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
Gustave Flaubert
You people have a religion of death that fills you with the joy and courage to confront it...I do not. I believe the only essential thing is to be alive.- Abrenucio
Gabriel García Márquez
I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.
John Fowles
The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.
George R.R. Martin
I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world
Gustave Flaubert
I am not ready to die,But I am learning to trust deathAs I have trusted life.I am movingToward a new freedom
May Sarton
They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion.
Gabriel García Márquez
But you said so yourself,the poor lass will die of it...Do you really want her to die?'Yes, I'd rather she died than have a bad life.
Émile Zola
There are women whose love only ends with death.
Georges Rodenbach
How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
Gustave Flaubert
İnsanlık öldü belki de hiç yaşamamıştı..!!Humanity was dead.Maybe never live too..!!
Oğuz Atay
Our essence is change. We are movement. Being out of balance is life. Perfect balance. Stasis. That is death. Life yearns for perfection. Death is perfection.
Chris Boucher
There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.
José Saramago
Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.
Gabriel García Márquez
I always say, if you must mount the gallows, give a jest to the crowd, a coin to the hangman, and make the drop with a smile on your lips.
Robert Jordan
Oh, we do not understand death, we never understand it; creatures are only truly dead when everyone else has died who knew them.
Arthur Schnitzler
After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until...
Walter de la Mare
If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body;--and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains,--then certes the soul does not inhabit there.
Laurence Sterne
So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I'd better not miss it, because once you're dead, it's too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.
Muriel Barbery
Why won't they let me be? I just need to rest, that's all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little.
George R.R. Martin
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
John Fowles
Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.
John Fowles
It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
Wallace Stegner
A man falling off a cliff to certain death will stretch out a hand even to his worst enemy.
Robert Jordan
Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
Thomas Mann
I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We rehearse for the big death through the little death of orgasm, through erotic living. Death as transfiguration
Peter Redgrove
She had no time for sleep, with the weight of the world upon her shoulders. And she feared to dream. Sleep is a little death, dreams the whisperings of the Other, who would drag us all into his eternal night.
George R.R. Martin
The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.
Guy de Maupassant
and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.
Gabriel García Márquez
The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.
W Somerset Maugham
Dr. Urbino caught the parrot around the neck with a triumphant sigh: ça y est. But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in the air and then he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday.Fermina Daza was in the kitchen tasting the soup for supper when she heard Digna Pardo's horrified shriek and the shouting of the servants and then of the entire neighborhood. She dropped the tasting spoon and tried to run despite the invincible weight of her age, screaming like a madwoman without knowing yet what had happened under the mango leaves, and her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his back in the mud, dead to this life but still resisting death's final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to come to him. He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked for her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful that she had ever seen them in the half century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath:"Only God knows how much I loved you.
Gabriel García Márquez
Death had to take her little by little, bit by bit, dragging her along to the bitter end of the miserable existence she'd made for herself. They never even knew what she did die of. Some spoke of a chill. But the truth was that she died from poverty, from the filth and the weariness of her wretched life.
Émile Zola
Does it make you brave to stick your hand in a bear's mouth? Would you do it again just because you didn't die?
Robert Jordan
A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.
Andrew Sean Greer