Quotes by Novelists - Page 141

Tyrion let the eunuch help him mount. "Lord Varys," he said from the saddle, "sometimes I feel as though you are the best friend I have in King's Landing and sometimes I feel you are my worst enemy." "How odd. I think quite the same of you.
George R.R. Martin
Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.
José Saramago
Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.
Jasper Fforde
A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked, and could have only one book, what would it be? I always say, "How to Build a Boat.
Stephen Wright
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.
Langston Hughes
I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!
Jasper Fforde
Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence.
Jasper Fforde
Dead. Never been that before. Not even once.
Jasper Fforde
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
John Irving
Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?
William Makepeace Thackeray
Noseless and Handless, the Lannister Boys.
George R.R. Martin
Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..
Gabriel García Márquez
If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.
Jasper Fforde
In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me
John Irving
...How would you like to die, Tyrion son of Tywin?""In my own bed, with a belly full of wine and a maiden's mouth around my cock, at the age of eighty," he replied.
George R.R. Martin
If you need help bark like a dog." - Gendry. "That's stupid. If I need help I'll shout help." - Arya
George R.R. Martin
Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.
Jasper Fforde
Thinking is hard work, which is why you don't see many people doing it.
Sue Grafton
Money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.
Françoise Sagan
People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
You're only a man! You've not our gifts! I can tell you! Why, a woman can think of a hundred different things at once, all them contradictory!
Georgette Heyer
You are your mother's trueborn son of Lannister.""Am I?" the dwarf replied, sardonic. "Do tell my lord father. My mother died birthing me, and he's never been sure.""I don't even know who my mother was," Jon said. "Some woman, no doubt. Most of them are." He favored Jon with a rueful grin. "Remember this, boy. All dwarfs may be bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs."And with that he turned and sauntered back into the feast, whistling a tune. When he opened the door, the light from within threw his shadow clear across the yard, and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood tall as a king.
George R.R. Martin
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
Herman Wouk
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving
Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
Howard Nemerov
Actually, you can be bad at something...but if you love doing it, that will be enough. - August Boatwright
Sue Monk Kidd
I have seen sights and travelled in countries you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at at a man for his help.
Philippa Gregory
After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
Russell Hoban
The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
Joseph Conrad
In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of people be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved integrity. Do not lose your knowledge that our proper estate is an upright posture,an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it's yours.
Ayn Rand
Time to toss the dice
Robert Jordan
Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear
Joseph Conrad
Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. Macondo era entonces una aldea de 20 casas de barro y cañabrava construidas a la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos. El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo".
Gabriel García Márquez
One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?""I've felt it all my life," she said.
Ayn Rand
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
René Daumal
I was good and bad, but never wicked.
Anne Rice
Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.
Benjamin Disraeli
Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.
Benjamin Disraeli
One more dance along the razor's edge finished. Almost dead yesterday, maybe dead tomorrow, but alive, gloriously alive, today.
Robert Jordan
that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.
Sue Monk Kidd
Always tell what you feel. Do what you think...
Gabriel García Márquez
Til shade is gone, til water is goneInto the shadow with teeth baredScreaming defiance with the last breathTo spit in Sightblinder’s eye on the Last Day.
Robert Jordan
When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.
Benjamin Disraeli
Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
Joseph Conrad
We do not remember days, we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese
Written words can also sing.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.
Joseph Conrad
The greatest ideas are the simplest.
William Golding
We all need to be mocked from time to time, lest we take ourselves too seriously.
George R.R. Martin
My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
Ayn Rand
Oh, what a tangled web we weave...when first we practice to deceive.
Walter Scott
He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.
Ayn Rand
What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within the span of his little life by him who interests his heart in everything.
Laurence Sterne
To love and win is the best thing.To love and lose, the next best.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.
David Guterson
We all give up great expectations along the way.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Its important to be comfortable with uncertainty.
Xiaolu Guo