Quotes by Novelists - Page 142

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.
Joseph Conrad
But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
Gustave Flaubert
A human being - what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts. Each human being becomes a little universe within the universe!
Guy de Maupassant
There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
So since I'm still here livin',I guess I will live on.I could've died for love--But for livin' I was born.
Langston Hughes
Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up and quick going down.
Guy de Maupassant
We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.
Gustave Flaubert
Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Life is a dream from which we all must wake before we can dream again.
Robert Jordan
Men's lives have meaning, not their deaths.
George R.R. Martin
I have given my word that only death will take me from you.
Philippa Gregory
Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.
Gabriel García Márquez
Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father's domains, and no sign of God, the young prince believed his father.But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace. He came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.Are those real islands?' asked the young prince.Of course they are real islands,' said the man in evening dress.And those strange and troubling creatures?'They are all genuine and authentic princesses.'Then God must exist!' cried the prince.I am God,' replied the man in full evening dress, with a bow.The young prince returned home as quickly as he could.So you are back,' said the father, the king.I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,' said the prince reproachfully. The king was unmoved.Neither real islands, nor real princesses, I have seen God,' said the prince reproachfully.The king was unmoved.Neither real islands, nor real princesses, nor a real God exist.'I saw them!'Tell me how God was dressed.'God was in full evening dress.'Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?'The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled.That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.'At this, the prince returned to the next land, and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.My father the king has told me who you are,' said the young prince indignantly. 'You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician.'The man on the shore smiled.It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father's kingdom there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father's spell, so you cannot see them.'The prince pensively returned home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eyes.Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?'The king smiled, and rolled back his sleeves.Yes, my son, I am only a magician.'Then the man on the shore was God.'The man on the shore was another magician.'I must know the real truth, the truth beyond magic.'There is no truth beyond magic,' said the king.The prince was full of sadness.He said, 'I will kill myself.'The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.Very well,' he said. 'I can bear it.'You see, my son,' said the king, 'you too now begin to be a magician.
John Fowles
Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows,Help us to seeThat without the dust the rainbowWould not be.
Langston Hughes
Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.
Ayn Rand
One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.
W Somerset Maugham
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.
John Irving
When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
Margaret Drabble
The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.
Walker Percy
There is nothing perfect...only life.
Sue Monk Kidd
Come clean with a child heartLaugh as peaches in the summer windLet rain on a house roof be a songLet the writing on your facebe a smell of apple orchards on late June.
Carl Sandburg
Every man should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he is old.
George R.R. Martin
He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
William Golding
Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.
José Saramago
A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?' . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time—the stuff of life.
Carl Sandburg
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
Carl Sandburg
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
George Moore
The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.
Sue Monk Kidd
I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.
Jean Rhys
Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.
Joseph Conrad
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
John Irving
A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man's life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose. (Maester Aemon)
George R.R. Martin
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thornton Wilder
My life is a reading list.
John Irving
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 they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
W Somerset Maugham
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
Langston Hughes
You can get all A's and still flunk life.
Walker Percy
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
Gustave Flaubert
The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us.
Anne Rice
To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?
Ayn Rand
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen
If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.
Sue Monk Kidd
All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.
Gabriel García Márquez
Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez
Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
Cesare Pavese
Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.
Ayn Rand
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
W Somerset Maugham
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
Gustave Flaubert
Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.
Thomas Keneally
The thing about getting older is that you don't need everything to be possible any more, you just need things to be certain.
Monica Ali
People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little.
James Hilton
If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
John Irving
Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez
Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.
George R.R. Martin
If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.
Jasper Fforde
I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.
Ayn Rand
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
Émile Zola
Life is for the living.Death is for the dead.Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.
Langston Hughes