Quotes by Novelists - Page 135

At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.
Gustave Flaubert
A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.
Carl Sandburg
There is a crack in everything.That's how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
Love, doesn't need any stamp of society to prove itself, it just happens
Shilpi
There is nothing more amazing than being with the one you love.
Shilpi
There is only one happiness in life. To love, and to be loved
Shilpi
My ex calls the ochre winter 'autumn' as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.— Broken Verses
Kamila Shamsie
While Nape was making the bread and Dryas boiling the ram, Daphnis and Chloe had time to go forth as far as the ivy-bush; and when he had set his snares again and pricked his lime-twigs, they not only catched good store of birds, but had a sweet collation of kisses without intermission, and a dear conversation in the language of love: "Chloe, I came for thy sake." "I know it, Daphnis." "'Tis long of thee that I destroy the poor birds." "What wilt thou with me?" "Remember me." "I remember thee, by the Nymphs by whom heretofore I have sworn in yonder cave, whither we will go as soon as ever the snow melts." "But it lies very deep, Chloe, and I fear I shall melt before the snow." "Courage, man; the Sun burns hot." "I would it burnt like that fire which now burns my very heart." "You do but gibe and cozen me!" "I do not, by the goats by which thou didst once bid me to swear to thee.
Longus (Longos)
I have always loved Elle. I love her now even more deeply than before, as the woman I wish to share my life with."~Sean O'Neill
Brenda Joyce
We're not mad. We're inhabited
Sue Moorcroft
Finally when he climbed below deck after dark, wondering where his dinner was, perhaps with a storm come up and rough seas and blinding rains, I'd sulk and lure him into the warm and steamy darkness and from the hairs of his warm body I'd breed a myriad smiling, sparkle-eyed one-year-olds, my broods, my flocks. In the churning seas, below the waves, together inside our hammock woven in coarse sailcloth by Unguentine's deft hands, a spherical webbed sack which hung and swivelled between the two walls of our bedroom, we would spin round and round with lapping tongues and the soft suction of lips, whirling, our amorous centrifuge, all night long, zipped inside against the elements. Now, years and years later, those nights, the thought and touch of them is enough to make me throw myself down on the ground and roll in the dust like a hen nibbled by mites, generating clouds, stars and all the rest.
Stanley Crawford
Un paraíso conseguido sin esfuerzo no entusiasma al creyente.
Pío Baroja
There is beautiful you are.""No," said Marged, between a sigh and a sob."Yes," said Owen."No," said Marged, not so certain."Behold," Owen said, from Solomon. "thou art fair. Thou hast dove's eyes.""Dove's eyes are small." Marged said."Yours are so big they are my whole world," said Owen.
Richard Llewellyn
Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.
Anthony Trollope
Whatever may have been said of the satiety of pleasure and of the disgust which usually follows passion, any man who has anything of a heart and who is not wretchedly and hopelessly blasé feels his love increased by his happiness, and very often the best way to retain a lover ready to leave is to give one's self up to him without reserve.
Théophile Gautier
Wahrscheinlich werde ich jede Nacht von dir träumen", sagte er. "Und wenn ich aufwache, weiß ich, dass der beste Teil des Tages schon vorbei ist.""Das hast du irgendwo gelesen.""Hab ich nicht.
Kai Meyer
It is possible,” said Miss Marling stiffly, “that Frederick and not Mary will have the ordering of thejourney.”Vidal chuckled. “Not if I know my Mary,” he replied
Georgette Heyer
How could I have ever loved Peg? I love you." And too late, he realized that the words he had just spoken were the truth. He closed his eyes, holding her even more tightly, allowing himself to finally realize and identify his feelings. He was stunned by their enormity, their intensity, their power.~Sean O'Neill
Brenda Joyce
Queer creatures, females," mused Mr. Standen, shaking his head. "Fellow's only got to be a rake to have 'em all dangling after him. Silly, really, because it stands to reason---- Well never mind that!
Georgette Heyer
She tugged warningly on his shirt. "I am serious! Are you going to marry me, Sean? Finally?"He smiled, and the light of his smile filled his eyes. "Damn it, Elle! Will you not let me take the lead? Ladies do not propose marriage!"~Sean O'Neill & Eleanor de Warenne
Brenda Joyce
Having realized that her affection for Sinclair went far beyond friendship, there was only one thing for her to do. She took off her hat and banged her head against the nearest lamppost.Also realizing she was drawing attention from passerby, she put her hat back on and resumed walking.
Shirley Karr
My hope, my heaven, my trust must be,My gentle guide, in following thee.
Walter Scott
As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
Gustave Flaubert
He had taken George, my beloved George, from me. And he had taken my other self: Anne.
Philippa Gregory
He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.
Thomas Mann
You ought to be blowing me kisses, wench.
George R.R. Martin
If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.
Honoré de Balzac
It is no wonder lesbians love women.
Gilbert Sorrentino
All those who love know exactly the limit they're prepared to go to. They know exactly what is required.
Nadeem Aslam
Those fine eyes of hers had a disconcertingly direct gaze, and very often twinkled in a manner disturbing to male egotism. She had common-sense too, and what man wanted the plainly matter-of-fact, when he could enjoy instead Sophia's delicious folly?
Georgette Heyer
If you are lost, I will find you. If you are in danger, I will protect you," he said seriously. "It's what a gentleman does, Elysse."~Alexi de Warenne to Elysse O'Neil
Brenda Joyce
Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
Charles Kingsley
If it comes to that," retorted Frederica, with spirit, " I am continually shocked by the things you don't scruple to say to me,cousin! You are quite abominable!"He sighed. "Alas, I know it! The reflection gives me sleepless nights.
Georgette Heyer
Romance is the sweetening of the soulWith fragrance offered by the stricken heart.
Wole Soyinka
Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.
Edna O'Brien
I comfort myself with the reflection that your wife will possibly be able to curb your desire--I admit, a natural one for the most part--to exterminate your fellows.
Georgette Heyer
We're going' Anne said firmly. So soon?' Percy pleaded. 'But stars come out at night.'Then they fade at dawn', Anne replied. 'This star needs to veil herself in darkness.
Philippa Gregory
When you can be this, why are you ever anything else? - Broken Verses
Kamila Shamsie
Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, in the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn’t be easy for you.
Ayn Rand
You will like her," he persisted. "Egad, she's after your own heart, maman! She shot me in the arm.""Voyons, do you think that is what I like?
Georgette Heyer
A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.
Honoré de Balzac
My house seems remarkably full of people," he observed. "Is it possible we were expected.
Georgette Heyer
Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.
Benjamin Disraeli
For this was the round of love: fear which leads on desire, tenderness and fury, and that brutal anguish which triumphantly follows pleasure.
Françoise Sagan
When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another's lips. Lovers are made by a kiss.
Émile Zola
I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat; you see I’m just another snowman standing in the rain and sleet who loved you with his frozen love, his second hand physique, with all he is and all he was a thousand kisses deep.
Leonard Cohen
When they see us dance. When they see how you look at me. When they see how I smile at you.
Philippa Gregory
There was a time when our desire for each other would have landed us in an asylum or prison, had it not been sanctioned by mutual assent. True or false.
Lawrence Krauser
I often think that he's the only one of us who's achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean he won't die someday. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with everyday that passes. . . They change, they deny, they contradict- and they call it growth. At the end there is nothing left, nothing unreveresed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out of an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they never held for a single moment? But Howard- one can imagine him living forever.
Ayn Rand
What d'you suppose I care if I'm a gentleman or not? If I were a gentleman I shouldn't waste my time with a vulgar slut like you.
W Somerset Maugham
Savez-vous que c'est à cause de cette recherche de ce que j'appellerais les compensations, cette rechercher d'un bonheur malgré tout, que naissent les manies et, souvent, les déséquilibres.
Georges Simenon
It was a gambler's action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback.
Nevil Shute
Philip thought that in throwing over the desire for happiness he was casting aside the last of his illusions. His life had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemed to gather strength as he realised that it might be measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design. He seemed for an instant to stand above the accidents of his existence, and he felt that they could not affect him again as they had done before. Whatever happened to him now would be one more motive to add to the complexity of the pattern, and when the end approached he would rejoice in its completion. It would be a work of art, and it would be none the less beautiful because he alone knew of its existence, and with his death it would at once cease to be.
W Somerset Maugham
He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover — that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it.
John Fowles
We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us.
Ayn Rand
There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.
Wallace Stegner
I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.
Hilary Mantel
I've been quite happy. Look, here are my proofs. Remember that I am indifferent to discomforts which would harass other folk. What do the circumstances of life matter if your dreams make you lord paramount of time and space?
W Somerset Maugham
It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.
Thornton Wilder
I hate you. I wish you was dead."Mrs. Carey gasped. He said the words so savagely that it gave her quite a start. She had nothing to say. She sat down in her husband's chair; and as she thought of her desire to love the friendless, crippled boy and her eager wish that he should love her--she was a barren woman and, even though it was clearly God's will that she should be childless, she could scarcely bear to look at little children sometimes, her heart ached so--the tears rose to her eyes and one by one, slowly, rolled down her cheeks. Philip watched her in amazement. She took out her handkerchief, and now she cried without restraint. Suddenly Philip realised that she was crying because of what he had said, and he was sorry. He went up to her silently and kissed her. It was the first kiss he had ever given herwithout being asked. And the poor lady, so small in her black satin, shrivelled up and sallow, with her funny corkscrew curls, took the little boy on her lap and put her arms around him and wept as though her heart would break. But her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.
W Somerset Maugham