Quotes by Novelists - Page 139

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
Honoré de Balzac
When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
C.P. Snow
I didn't set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.
Jasper Fforde
Half-truths are worth more than outright lies.
George R.R. Martin
The truth is the last thing that matters,' she said. 'And you can believe one thing of the truth and me: I keep it well hidden, inside my heart.
Philippa Gregory
Nothing in this world is hidden forever. The gold which has lain for centuries unsuspected in the ground, reveals itself one day on the surface. Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned. Fire itself leaves the confession, in ashes, of the substance consumed in it. Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes; and Love finds the Judas who betrays it by a kiss. Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.
Wilkie Collins
He drew the dagger and laid it on the table between them; a length of dragonbone and Valyrian steel, as sharp as the difference between right and wrong, between true and false, between life and death.
George R.R. Martin
For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like.
Muriel Spark
I am an inconsistent creature. Perhaps it is the pressure of my past, and not my own perverse mind, that has made me into this contradictory being. I am all too well aware of this fault in myself. You must forgive me.
Sōseki Natsume
Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.
W Somerset Maugham
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.
Tim O'Brien
He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague . . . He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightening on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands.
W Somerset Maugham
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 last, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.
Sue Monk Kidd
I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.
Jasper Fforde
He looked at me intently, from what seemed behind the veil of a grave experience. Then slowly and prophetically, he said the scariest thing I'd ever heard: "Because the answer to a heartfelt question, Jack, will always break your heart.
Thomas H. Cook
Use your intellect to guide you, and you will end up putting peopleoff. Rely on your emotions, and you will forever be pushed around.Force your will on others, and you will live in constant tension. Thereis no getting around it—people are hard to live with.
Sōseki Natsume
I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.
Gabriel García Márquez
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
Tim O'Brien
A thing can be true and still be desperate folly, Hazel.
Richard Adams
We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It was queer how sometimes a child's innocent eyes can see things that grown men are blind to.
George R.R. Martin
Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.
Benjamin Disraeli
There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it.
Ayn Rand
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.
W Somerset Maugham
Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.
Sue Monk Kidd
When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.
Ayn Rand
There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Benjamin Disraeli
Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.
George R.R. Martin
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
Tim O'Brien
People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.
George R.R. Martin
Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.
Gabriel García Márquez
In the heat of the battle, all internal barriers break down; the puppet bourgeoisie of businessmen and shopkeepers, the urban proletariat, which is always in a privileged position, the lumpen-proletariat of the shanty towns - all fall into line with the stand made by the rural masses, that veritable reservoir of a national revolutionary army; for in those countries where colonialism has deliberately held up development, the peasantry, when it rises, quickly stands out as the revolutionary class. For it knows naked oppression, and suffers far more from it than the workers in the towns, and in order not to die of hunger, it demands no less than a complete demolishing of all existing structures. In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist
Jean-Paul Sarte
Writing a book is a herculean task, but the toughest thing is to get convinced with your work, and finally give it a green signal.
Shivam Chaudhary
The Universe, solitude, passion, and recognition won't ever let you hate your life. Try to be as close to them as possible.
Shivam Chaudhary
Your own chosen paths can never be wrong. It is just the intensity of your curiosity in you which is pretty low.
Shivam Chaudhary
Nothing' isn't better or worse than anything. Nothing is just... nothing." Arya Stark
George R.R. Martin
Myslím, že na místa, kde se odvíjely rozhodující události našich životů, stojí za to občas zavítat, abychom zjistili: nemáme sami se sebou nic společného.
Imre Kertész
An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.
Russell Hoban
If disaster, so be it, they said to themselves. There was nothing to be done except what could be done. The rest -- like the salt water around them, which swallowed the snow without effort, remaining what it was implacably -- was out of their hands, beyond.
David Guterson
Weather is a purely personal matter. There is no such thing as a climate that is cold or hot, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. People take it upon themselves to create a fantasy in their imagination and call it weather. There's only one climate in the world, but the message that nature sends is interpreted according to strictly personal, non-transferable rules.
Álvaro Mutis
I pretend not to be a champion of that same naked virtue called truth, to the very outrance. I can consent that her charms be hidden with a veil, were it but for decency's sake.
Walter Scott
Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt.
Ayn Rand
There is nothing more wonderful than a book. It may be a message to us from the dead, from human souls we never saw who lived perhaps thousands of miles away, and yet these little sheets of paper speak to us, arouse us, teach us, open our hearts and in turn open their hearts to us like brothers. Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, philosophy lame.
Charles Kingsley
They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.
Kim Stanley Robinson
By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.
Joseph Conrad
If that which we have found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, than what is good and what is evil?
Ayn Rand
To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.
Muriel Barbery
The source of man's rights is not divine law or a congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A ___ and man is man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product for his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational
Ayn Rand
Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes."Waddington reflected for a little while. "I wonder if it matters what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books the write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
W Somerset Maugham
What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?
C.L.R. James
How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.
Nadeem Aslam
On the top of Cadair Idris,I felt how happy a man might bewith a little money and a sane intellect,and reflected with astonishment and pityon the madness of the multitude.
Thomas Love Peacock
The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.
José Saramago
Man is an end in himself.
Ayn Rand
If I could put it into a very few words, dear sir, I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excesses of all kinds—even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself.
James Hilton
Any game where the goal is to build territory has to be beautiful. There may be phases of combat, but they are only means to an end, to allow your territory to survive. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the game of go is that it has been proven that in order to win, you must live, but you must also allow the other player to live. Players who are too greedy will lose: it is a subtle game of equilibrium, where you have to get ahead without crushing the other player. In the end, life and death are only the consequences of how well or how poorly you have made your construction. This is what one of Taniguchi's characters says: you live, you die, these are consequences. It's a proverb for playing go, and for life.
Muriel Barbery
Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.
Ayn Rand