Quotes by Novelists - Page 138

Rafael?””Yeah?”„Do we all have monsters?”„Yes.”„Why does God give us so many monsters?”„You want to know my theory?”„Sure.”„I think it’s other people who give us monsters. Maybe God doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
How do we accomplish this matter of gathering life together in God? We must begin primarily by refocusing our attention keeping our minds and hearts directed toward God. The essence of the centered life is attention to God in all we think, say and do. It is the growing realization of His presence in our most down-to-earth living.
Sue Monk Kidd
One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.--"Wanda
Ouida
Don’t you know what god is? God is everything and God is nothing; for the perfection created by man cannot be anything other than nothing. They decided to give a name to nothingness, and thereby the made it become something. Like you… God, who is nothing, can no longer be nothing since he is God. You could be a god for men. They need to give a body to nothingness so that nothingness can be seen and touched-at least with the imagination.
Aldo Palazzeschi
If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.
Gabriel García Márquez
The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.
Sinclair Lewis
Here I am going to say something which may come as a bit of a shock. God doesn't necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love. Able to be loved by Him. We don't start off being all that lovable, if we're honest. What makes people hard to love? Isn't it what is commonly called selfishness? Selfish people are hard to love because so little love comes out of them.
William Nicholson
A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.
Carl Sandburg
Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn't stick with your original idea of paradise? People's lives were a mess.
Sue Monk Kidd
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
John Irving
God abandons only those who abandon themselves, and whoever has the courage to shut up his sorrow within his own heart is stronger to fight against it than he who complains.
George Sand
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
John Fowles
My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show.
Gabriel García Márquez
People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.
Anne Rice
The hard truths are the ones to hold tight.-The Old Bear, A Game of Thrones
George R.R. Martin
-Хүү минь, чи надад ямар ч өргүй гэж бодож явах эрхийг би чамд олголоо.
Honoré de Balzac
Bowden Cable is the sort of honest and dependable operative that is the backbone of SpecOps. They never win commendations or medalsand the public has no knowledge of them at all. They are all worth ten of people like me.
Jasper Fforde
Stories are masks of God.That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.
Melanie Tem
In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even beauty is only a vein sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of ones clothes in a community of blind men.
Joseph Conrad
LIBERTY! FREEDOM! DEMOCRACY!True anyhow no matter how manyLiars use those words.
Langston Hughes
Cada vez que un libro cambia de manos, cada vez que alguien desliza la mirada por sus páginas, su espíritu crece y se hace fuerte. (Sempere)
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.
Wallace Stegner
It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.
John Irving
... we are only ever pretending to ourselves, never to other people ...
José Saramago
She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream,--and there was no answer one could make her--there seemed to be no forgiveness for such a transgression.And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?
Joseph Conrad
And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?
Joseph Conrad
I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.
Ayn Rand
I am going to die, but that is of no importance.
Muriel Barbery
The fact is that nothing is more difficult to believe than the truth; conversely, nothing seduces like the power of lies, the greater the better. It's only natural, and you will have to find the right balance. Having said that, let me add that this particular old woman hasn't been collecting only years; she has also collected stories, and none sadder or more terrible than the one she's about to tell you. You have been at the heart of this story without knowing it until today ...
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.
John Irving
The dead never go to their own funeral.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple's corridors; she does not know herself. 'I can endure lies,' she cries. 'I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude
Thornton Wilder
The number of those who have nothing to recommend them and of those in whom nothing but good can be found is probably equal
Murasaki Shikibu
The thirst for knowledge is like a piece of ass you know you shouldn't chase; in the end, you chase it just the same.
George Pelecanos
I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath.
Wilkie Collins
That casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that had still not ended half a century later.
Gabriel García Márquez
The best fiction is true.
Kinky Friedman
Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moran or a lout, howeverm doesn't stop to think or reason.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
God is willing to walk the earth again incarnate in us.
Eugenia Price
Silence is the mother of truth.
Benjamin Disraeli
The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128
Kim Stanley Robinson
Fat men take a cushion with them wherever they go.
George R.R. Martin
To be haunted is to glimpse a truth that might best be hidden.
James Herbert
I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth. Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. The mind is powerless against them. Yet we have to deal with them. If we want to accomplish anything, we have to deceive them into letting us accomplish it. Or force them. They understand nothing else. We cannot expect their support for any endeavor of the intellect, for any goal of the spirit. They are nothing but vicious animals. They are greedy, self-indulgent, predatory dollar-chasers
Ayn Rand
Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?''For fun?''Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.
John Fowles
Truth is a risky proposition. It's the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies.
Anne Rice
There are few things in life worse than a long-winded lawyer.
John Grisham
All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it.
Joseph Conrad
This thought strengthened in me my belief that all men, without exception, deserve to be pitied, if only because they are alive.
Alberto Moravia
Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."[Letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867]
George Sand
Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images, the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire: that is MUHAMMAD. As regards all the standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask IS THERE ANY MAN GREATER THAN HE?
Alphonse de Lamartine
What is too absurd to be believed is believed because it is too absurd to be a lie.
Robert Jordan
I can't explain that, except to say there's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at least, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.
Sue Monk Kidd
I never truckled. I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn't like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth.
Frank Norris
Without balance, a life is no longer worth the effort.
Olen Steinhauer
It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.
William Golding
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
Rémy de Gourmont
I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.
William Golding
You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.
Imre Kertész
The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.
Carlos Fuentes