Quotes by Novelists - Page 136

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
John Irving
Happiness is the change that comes over mewhen I describe the worldIt comes over the worldHappiness is the change that comes over mewhen I'm afraidIt comes over the worldFor instance I can be afraid of and for the worldafraid because the world consists among other thingsof me so swiftly dying
Inger Christensen
Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.
George Gissing
I am happy and content because I think I am.
Alain-René Le Sage
There are some delightful places in this world which have a sensual charm for the eyes. One loves them with a physical love. We people who are attracted by the countryside cherish fond memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain ponds, certain hills, which have become familiar sights and can touch our hearts like happy events.Sometimes indeed the memory goes back towards a forest glade, or a spot on a river bank or an orchard in blossom, glimpsed only once on a happy day, but preserved in our heart.
Guy de Maupassant
I absolutely think that happiness is a choice. One of the most potent forces in human psychology is the power of habit. Do something, think something, often enough and it will become the only thing you can do or think. Choose to be unhappy and soon that’s all you will be. Live in a swamp and you’ll grow webbed feet.
Nicholas Evans
Ivan tells Anna: "I used to imagine that being embraced by a woman . . . as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everthing . . . [But] happiness, it turns out, will be to share with you the burden I can't share with anyone else.
Vasily Grossman
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
George Santayana
It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
W Somerset Maugham
You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
Lawrence Durrell
Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.
Heather O'Neill
I used to float along in all of this, like a leaf on a coursing stream, but i am heavier now, less easily moved, more resolute and steadfast. I am no longer in pursuit of happiness. As I stand here at my front door, key in hand, I think it is just possible that happiness, at least for now, today, this hour, may be in pursuit of me.
Anne Giardini
Straight lines go too quickly to appreciate the pleasures of the journey. They rush straight to their target and then die in the very moment of their triumph without having thought, loved, suffered or enjoyed themselves. Broken lines do not know what they want. With their caprices they cut time up, abuse routes, slash the joyous flowers and split the peaceful fruits with their corners. It is another story with curved lines. The song of the curved line is called happiness.
René Crevel
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
Anthony Trollope
Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
John Irving
Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom
Gustave Flaubert
Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable? One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others--the minted round of metal. And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.
George Gissing
Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
Ayn Rand
One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.
Gabriel García Márquez
And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.
Honoré de Balzac
We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
John Fowles
Why did you look at the sunset?'Philip answered with his mouth full:Because I was happy.
W Somerset Maugham
Making money isn't hard in itself,what's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting your life to
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been--for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.
Ayn Rand
To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
George Santayana
She felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. Afterward she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it. Now, however, she knows she wasn't being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It's a rare gift to under stand that you life is wondrous, and that it won't last forever.
Steven Galloway
What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
Thomas Mann
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
Gustave Flaubert
Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.
Honoré de Balzac
Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move.
Ayn Rand
One is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience.
George Sand
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet.
James Oppenheim
Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me'. Then he wonders why he's unhappy.
Ayn Rand
Laughter is poison to fear.
George R.R. Martin
Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
Ayn Rand
All happiness depends on courage and work.
Honoré de Balzac
No medicine cures what happiness cannot.
Gabriel García Márquez
In the distance, I can see a storm coming in, the dark clouds and the lightning on the horizon moving towards me. I wait and I wait and I wait for the storm. And then it comes, and the rains wash away the nightmares and the memories. And I'm not afraid.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The biggest magic of the world is DEATH.
Shilpa Dasgupta
In darkness, some flowers blossom!
Shirley Houston
I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.
Thomas Mallon
Only something extremely dire and disabling will ever stop a real writer from writing. Retirement is never an option.
Warren Adler
The choices one makes, not one's blood, determine one's destiny - John Steinbeck
Laxmi Hariharan
I promise.For the other side of the card, I put the giraffe and penguin on it and wrote:To think and try not to over think.To breathe, but not hyperventilate.To try to envision the best, and not dwell on the worst.To call you when I'm in trouble.To not do anything permanent on a situation that might be temporary.
Shirley Miranda
Transient guests are we.
Hideyuki Kikuchi
love yourself,.,.,.,for the sake of your better future
John Grisham
When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.
Enrique Jardiel Poncela
If they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
Gabriel García Márquez
Everybody has a right to their own troubles.
Thornton Wilder
Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. And Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And even bigger than Japan... Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself ― not to Japan, not to anything. You may think that what you're doing is for the sake of the nation, but let something take possession of you like that, and all you do is bring it down.
Sōseki Natsume
Let’s face it, life is trivial, and my guess is that dying imparts very little wisdom on those in process.
Sue Grafton
Se ciascuno pensa solo a se stesso e non si fida che di se stesso, come volete che ci sia coraggio civile, dal momento che questa virtù si basa sulla rinuncia a se stessi? Coraggio civile e coraggio militare nascono dallo stesso principio. Voi siete chiamati a dare la vostra vita in un sol momento, la nostra si consuma a goccia a goccia. Da entrambe le parti è la stessa lotta, sotto forme diverse. Non basta essere onesti per far progredire il più piccolo paese, bisogna anche essere preparati; senza contare che istruzione, onestà, amor di patria non valgono niente se non c'è la ferma volontà di trascurare ogni interesse personale per dedicarsi al pubblico bene
Honoré de Balzac
The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.
May Sarton
Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.
Charles Kingsley
The worship of power is an old religion.
George Santayana
The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Would that death were like this. Would that one would sleep and sleep and sleep forever.
Anne Rice
I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.
C.P. Snow
Let us be sure that the lady of our choice possesses certain tangible qualities that we admire; and if in other ways she falls short of our ideal, we must be patient and call to mind those qualities that first induced us to begin our courting.
Murasaki Shikibu