Quotes by Novelists - Page 137

Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are a malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth.
José Saramago
The years I have squandered in puerile excitement, in going hither and thither, in seeking to force nature and time, I ought to have spent in solitude and meditation, in endeavoring to make myself worthy of being loved.
Théophile Gautier
Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
Any man who has got himself set over others and don't have any responsibility to something bigger than him is a son of a bitch.
Oakley Hall
One must not make too much of anything in life, good or bad.
Joseph Conrad
Dzieje kultury wykazują, ze głupota jest siostrą bliźniaczą rozumu, ona rośnie najbujniej nie na glebie dziewiczej ignorancji , lecz na gruncie uprawnym siódmym potem doktorów i profesorów. Wielkie absurdy nie są wymyślane przez tych, których rozum krząta się wokół spraw codziennych. Nic dziwnego zatem, że właśnie najintensywniejsi myśliciele bywali producentami największego głupstwa. / The history of culture shows that foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom. It does not flourish on the fields of pure ignorance but on the fields tirelessly plowed by doctors and professors. Great absurdities do not flourish where one is busy with everyday life. No wonder that sometimes most vigorous thinkers come up with utmost stupidities. (Dziennik 1956, XIX, Thursday)
Witold Gombrowicz
Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today.Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction.See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.
Carl Sandburg
The maid told him that a girl and a child had come looking for him, but since she didn't know them, she hadn't cared to ask them in, and had told them to go on to Mers."Why didn't you let them in?" asked Germain angrily. "People must be very suspicious in this part of the world, if they won't open the front door to a neighbor.""Well, naturally!" replied the maid. "In a house as rich as this, you have to keep a close watch on things. While the master's away I'm responsible for everything, and I can't just open the door to anyone at all.""That's a mean way to live," said Germain; "I'd rather be poor than live in fear like that. Good-bye to you, miss, and good-bye to this horrible country of yours!
George Sand
I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs.Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.
Shirley Jackson
What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?
W Somerset Maugham
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more /the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort /to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires /and expires, too soon, too soon /before life itself
Joseph Conrad
But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.
Benjamin Disraeli
Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.
W Somerset Maugham
Tell no man anything, for no man listensYet hold thy lips ready to speak.
Carl Sandburg
Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
Wallace Stegner
The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.
Charles Kingsley
The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly--we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone's life. I may list things that might be described as my accomplishments in these few pages, but they are only shadows of the larger truth, fragments separated from the whole cycle of becoming. And if I can tell an old-time story now about a man who is walking about, waudjoset ndatlokugan, a forest lodge man, alesakamigwi udlagwedewugan, it is because I spent many years walking about myself, listening to voices that came not just from the people but from animals and trees and stones.
Joseph Bruchac
for a woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea
Honoré de Balzac
It don't do you no nevermind to tell nobody nothing.
Thomas McGuane
You can never know everything. Part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of knowledge lies in going on anyway.
Robert Jordan
The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner
Okay, this is the wisdom. First, time spent on reconnaissanse is never wasted. Second, almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon. And finally, there is no problem on Earth that can't be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea.
Jasper Fforde
Is it so far from madness to wisdom?" - Daenerys Targaryen
George R.R. Martin
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner
wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
Gabriel García Márquez
It is one thing to be clever and another to be wise.
George R.R. Martin
Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
Margaret Drabble
Hold fast to dreams,For if dreams dieLife is a broken-winged bird,That cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
The Maker offers us creation itself as proof of his greatness.
Anne Rice
He could breathe more freely in a lighter air. He was responsible only to himself for the things he did. Freedom! He was his own master at last. From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.
W Somerset Maugham
Cristo quería a los justos, habitaba las buenas conciencias, pertenecía a los hombres de bien, a la gente decente, a las buenas reputaciones. ¡Que cargara el diablo con los humildes, con los pecadores, con los abandonados, con los rebeldes, con los miserables, con los que quedaban al margen del orden aceptado!
Carlos Fuentes
For this will cure him that is sick, and rouse him that is in dumps; one that has loved, it will remember of it; one that has not, it will instruct. For there was never any yet that wholly could escape love, and never shall there be any, never so long as beauty shall be, never so long as eyes can see. But help me that God to write the passions of others; and while I write, keep me in my own right wits.
Longus
Le hasard, c'est peut-être le pseudonyme de Dieu quand il ne veut pas signer.
Théophile Gautier
If there is a God who made us and we did wrong before His eyes—as George says—at least we did wrong only because we were as God made us, and I do not think that He should set traps. Oh, you should know better than George! Let us not bring all that back into the world again—the angry God, the mean God—the one who does not tell us the rules of the game, and then strikes us when we break them. Let us not bring Him back.
George R. Stewart
God the EaterThere is a god in whom I do not believeYet to this god my love stretches,This god whom I do not believe in isMy whole life, my life and I am his.Everything that I have of pleasure and pain(Of pain, of bitter pain and men's contempt)I give this god for him to feed uponAs he is my whole life and I am his.When I am dead I hope that he will eatEverything I have been and have not beenAnd crunch and feed upon it and grow fatEating my life all up as it is his.
Stevie Smith
If there is a god, or hundreds of them, I hope they will forgive me for the harm I may have inflicted on you by telling you exactly what happened.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.
Gustave Flaubert
Não importava que Deus no céu fosse católico, protestante ou hindu. O que importava era uma coisa mais profunda, mais antiga e mais forte do que qualquer imagem dessas: um conceito do bem baseado na afirmação da vida, na repulsa à destruição, à perversidade, ao uso e abuso do homem pelo homem. Era a afirmação do humano e do natural.
Anne Rice
You may conquer her love of God: you will never overcome her fear of the devil.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing, I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting To the purpose of One Above who is experimentingWith various mixtures of human character which goes best, All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us. There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to doThen you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.
Stevie Smith
Na ca mi-a slabit vederea. Te rogi atata timp sa ti se arate Dumnezeu si cand ai ajuns langa El, nu-L mai vezi.
Marin Sorescu
Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.
Georges Bernanos
A certain wise man once said that God didn't play dice with the universe, but that man was wrong. Sometimes I think He must even try Russian roulette.
Daína Chaviano
I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen.""I think you may be."I smiled dubiously. "Thank you.""It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.
John Fowles
I saw my real gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity.
Anne Rice
To put it another way, pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can't he rouse us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be wakened, is the dream that all is well.
William Nicholson
Away with them, away; we should not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good. Think of them as persons from the fairy wood.
Stevie Smith
The Lord doesn't want anybody in His house who has to be dragged there.
Frank D. Gilroy
There was one question, however, which Inciarte had asked him and he could not answer. Why was it that he had lived while others had died? What purpose had God in making this selection? What sense could be made out of it? ‘None,’ replied Father Andrés. ‘There are times when the will of God cannot be understood by our human intelligence. There are things which in all humility we must accept as a mystery.
Piers Paul Read
We are here in a wood of little beeches: And the leaves are like black lace Against a sky of nacre. One bough of clear promise Across the moon. It is in this wise that God speaketh unto me. He layeth hands of healing upon my flesh, Stilling it in an eternal peace, Until my soul reaches out myriad and infinite hands Toward him, And is eased of its hunger. And I know that this passes: This implacable fury and torment of men, As a thing insensate and vain: And the stillness hath said unto me, Over the tumult of sounds and shaken flame, Out of the terrible beauty of wrath, I alone am eternal. One bough of clear promise Across the moon
Frederic Manning
I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker’s head if they’re not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it’s bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God’s face when it’s bitter
Gustave Flaubert
He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something.
Sue Monk Kidd
God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world
Gustave Flaubert
However hard he tried, he could never manage to make himself visible to human eyes and not because he can't, since for him nothing is impossible, it's simply that he wouldn't know what face to wear when introducing himself to the beings he supposedly created and who probably wouldn't recognize him anyway. There are those who say we're very fortunate that god chooses not to appear before us, because compared with the shock we would get were such a thing to happen, our fear of death would be mere child's play. Besides, all the many things that have been said about god and about death are nothing but stories, and this is just another one.
José Saramago
How could anyone love Him? What did you just tell me yourself about the world? Don't you see, everybody hates God now. It's not that God is dead in the twentieth century. It's that everybody hates Him! At least I think so.
Anne Rice
Sometimes the Lord allows us to go through tough times so we learn to rely upon Him.
Shirley Corder
we need not avoid our active lives, but simply bring to them a new vision and shift of gravity. for in the center we are rooted in god's love. in such a place there is no need for striving and impatience and dashing about seeking approval.
Sue Monk Kidd
God sends meat and the devil sends cooks.
Thomas Deloney
There's a major fault in Western society. It makes room for only one god, and in only one gender. There's no balance, no co-existence, no partnership.
Tomson Highway
Self-sufficiency is the enemy of salvation. If you are self-sufficient, you have no need of God. If you have no need of God, you do not seek Him. If you do not seek Him, you will not find Him.
William Nicholson