Quotes by Novelists - Page 17

Learn to drink the cup of life as it comes.
Agnes Turnbull
Don't be sad don't be angry if life deceives you! Submit to your grief your time for joy will come believe me.
Aleksandr Pushkin
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
The most popular persons are those who take the world as it is who find the least fault.
Charles Dudley Warner
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
Ouida
Sometimes when one person is missing the whole world seems depopulated.
Alphonse de Lamartine
The longer a nation's history, the more wars, invasions, wanderings, and periods of captivity it has seen-the greater the diversity of its faces.
Vasily Grossman
Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.
George R.R. Martin
Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.
Carlos Fuentes
Astarte has come again, more powerful than before. She possesses me. She lies in wait for me.December 97My cruelty has also returned: the cruelty which frightens me. It lies dormant for months, for years, and then all at once awakens, bursts forth and - once the crisis is over - leaves me in mortal terror of myself.Just now in the avenue of the Bois, I whipped my dog till he bled, and for nothing - for not coming immediately when I called! The poor animal was there before me, his spine arched, cowering close to the ground, with his great, almost human, eyes fixed on me... and his lamentable howling! It was as though he were waiting for the butcher! But it was as if a kind of drunkenness had possessed me. The more I struck out the more I wanted to strike; every shudder of that quivering flesh filled me with some incomprehensible ardour. A circle of onlookers formed around me, and I only stopped myself for the sake of my self-respect.Afterwards, I was ashamed.I am always ashamed of myself nowadays. The pulse of life has always filled me with a peculiar rage to destroy. When I think of two beings in love, I experience an agonising sensation; by virtue of some bizarre backlash, there is something which smothers and oppresses me, and I suffocate, to the point of anguish.Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night to the muted hubbub of bumps and voices which suddenly become perceptible in the dormant city - all the cries of sexual excitement and sensuality which are the nocturnal respiration of cities - I feel weak. They rise up around me, submerging me in a sluggish flux of embraces and a tide of spasms. A crushing weight presses down on my chest; a cold sweat breaks out on my brow and my heart is heavy - so heavy that I have to get up, run bare-foot and breathless, to my window, and open both shutters, trying desperately to breathe. What an atrocious sensation it is! It is as if two arms of steel bear down upon my shoulders and a kind of hunger hollows out my stomach, tearing apart my whole being! A hunger to exterminate love.Oh, those nights! The long hours I have spent at my window, bent over the immobile trees of the square and the paving-stones of the deserted street, on watch in the silence of the city, starting at the least noise! The nights I have passed, my heart hammering in anguish, wretchedly and impatiently waiting for my torment to consent to leave me, and for my desire to fold up the heavy wings which beat inside the walls of my being like the wings of some great fluttering bird!Oh, my cruel and interminable nights of impotent rebellion against the rutting of Paris abed: those nights when I would have liked to embrace all the bodies, to suck in all the breaths and sup all the mouths... those nights which would find me, in the morning, prostrate on the carpet, scratching it still with inert and ineffectual fingers... fingers which never know anything but emptiness, whose nails are still taut with the passion of murder twenty-four hours after the crises... nails which I will one day end up plunging into the satined flesh of a neck, and...It is quite clear, you see, that I am possessed by a demon... a demon which doctors would treat with some bromide or with all-healing sal ammoniac! As if medicines could ever be imagined to be effective against such evil!
Jean Lorrain
[Men] act in response to an outward situation, and on being presented with an opportunity to conform to a pattern. If the pattern gives licence to cruelty, so much the better. They take advantage of the licence so thoughtlessly, so thoroughly, that it becomes perfectly clear: the generality of mankind are only waiting for the chance, only waiting for outward circumstance to sanction brutality and allow them to be cruel and brutal to their heart's content.
Thomas Mann
In a cruel land, you either learned to laugh at cruelty or spent your life weeping.
Robert Jordan
It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was the cause of such ugliness, and the only thing that made me feel was a cruel pleasure which, I thought, was bound to transfigure my own face, to make me resplendent. I was then 23 years old. From that moment on, I felt capable of advancing in cruelty.
Jean Genet
We're all just songs in the end. If we are lucky.
George R.R. Martin
Don Ricardo wanted a successor worthy of himself. Jorge would always be cocooned in the privileges of his class, hiding from his mediocrity in creature comforts. Penelope, the beautiful Penelope, was a woman, and therefore a treasure, not a treasurer. Julian, who had the soul of a poet, and therefore the soul of a murderer, fulfilled all the requirements. It was only a question of time.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The little bit you and me might change the world," Malloy smiled, "it wouldnt show up until a hundred years after we were dead. We'd never see it.""But it'd be there.
James Jones
Be equal to your talent, not your age. At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
More than that, in the five hundred years of European OCCUPATION, Native cultures have already driven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient.
Thomas King
Sadly, it is within the religious domain that the phenomenon of rhetorical hysteria takes its most devastating form. I am aware that, in some minds, this tends to be regarded as a delicate subject. Let me declare very simply that I do not share such a sentiment. There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents. We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life. One of my all-time favourite lines comes from the black American poet Langston Hughes. It reads, simply, 'There is no lavender word for lynch'.
Wole Soyinka
...the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve.
John Irving
Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.
Tim O'Brien
For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
Gustave Flaubert
I wish i could tell you what i feel for you... nothing seems right not even you... i wish i could ask him to make everything normal...
shivangi lavaniya
I wish you'd fall in love with me," she said."Why?""Because you're really someone worth falling in love with. And if we were in love, I wouldn't be drifting. I wouldn't be nobody. At least not while I was with you.
Anne Rampling
But what really won me over was his butt. What finally made it impossible for me not to like the man was how right out there on the Adventist basepaths, right in front of eighty or ninety of the kind of pious adult spectators who spent their every Sabbath if not their entire lives trying to forget the existence of things like butts, Beal's buns were trying to light a fire by friction inside his jeans; they were gyrating like a washing machine with its load off balance; they were thrashing against his pants like two big halibut against the bottom of a boat. And the wonderful thing, the amazing thing, was how once his older audience got over the shock of it, they began to look amused at, then fascinated by, and finally downright grateful toward his writhing reminder that yes, buns did exist, and yes, every one of us owned not one but two of the things, and yes, like the God who created them in His Image, they did indeed move in mysterious ways.
David James Duncan
The ship's surgeon was a spotty unshaven little man whose clothes, arrayed with smudges, drippings, and cigarette burns, were held about him by an extensive network of knotted string, The buttons down the front of those duck trousers had originally been made, with all of false economy's ingenious drear deception, of coated cardboard. After many launderings they persisted as a row of gray stumps posted along the gaping portals of his fly. Though a boutoniere sometimes appeared through some vacancy in his shirt-front, its petals, too, proved to be of paper, and he looked like the kind of man who scrapes foam from the top of a glass of beer with the spine of a dirty pocket comb, and cleans his nails at table with the tines of his salad fork, which things, indeed, he did. He diagnosed Camilla's difficulty as indigestion, and locked himself in his cabin. that was the morning.
William Gaddis
Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?
John Irving
I believe, Sebastian, that novels are more important than ever. They are more important than video recorders and record players and television because they enable us to exercise our minds. They allow us to step back and see where the history is taking us.
Imraan Coovadia
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casual
John Irving
and nothing can be more captivating than the waves hitting the shore
shivangi lavaniya
Here too was the terrifying fixed curve of the infinite, the creeping curve of logic which at least must become the final signpost at the edge of nothing. After that - the deluge. The great white light of annihilation. The bright flash of death... ("Mr. Arcularis")
Conrad Aiken
When there hasn't been anything there, nothing can be said to have vanished from the place where it has not been.("Out Of The Deep")
Walter de la Mare
Élodie, who was rising fifteen, lifted her anaemic, puffy, virginal face with its wispy hair; she was so thin-blooded that good country air seemed only to make her more sickly.
Émile Zola
If you write a line of zeroes, it´s still nothing.
Ayn Rand
Events went on to show that it is not by chance that a prime minister reaches such lofty heights and that, as the infallible wisdom of nations has demonstrated time and time again, each country gets the government it deserves, although it must be said that while it is true to say that prime ministers, for good or ill, are not all the same, it is no less true to say, are all countries.
José Saramago
If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
John Fowles
As for Jenny, she felt only that women - just like men - should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.
John Irving
No, no, my good knight, do not fear for me. The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons, don't you see? Don't you SEE?
George R.R. Martin
Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.
José Saramago
...I only told you about it because I thought I might get a laugh out of you for once even if it wasn't the truth, Jessie. Things don't have to be true to talk about 'em, you know.
Marsha Norman
Moreover it is easier, in the informality of conversation, to achieve that excitement and incoherence which is the true eloquence of love.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Stephen Tennant is the most sparkling talker who ever comes to my house, and perhaps the most amusing. He dances like the will-o'-the-wisp where other people stick in the mud. Though his really kindred spirits are the most exotic people he can find, he also greatly enjoys a talk with some extremely commonplace person, when he pretends that he thinks they mean something which they never thought of in their lives. He can be by turns poetic, malicious, and nonsensical. His talk is very pictorial and he handles words as if they were pait on a brush. When Stephen is alone with one friend he is often drawn to speak of very grave and profound subjects, and then he becomes unhappy, for he is never sure about what he loves and believes in, and would like to love and believe in so much.
Edith Olivier
I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking." She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried,” she said, “was because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all.
Shirley Jackson
A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.
W Somerset Maugham
If we are taken all together, we might muster some courage, but from the previous evidence it is likely that we will be taken separately.
Edna O'Brien
Sometimes the guys who look the most normal are the biggest pervs of all.
Teddy Wayne
It was cold and barren. It was no longer the view that I remembered. The sunshine of her presence was far from me. The charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear.
Wilkie Collins
I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.
Muriel Spark
Why should anyone be surprised at what the men "in power" are capable of --didn't every mad-Judas one of them begin his career by slowly & brutally strangling an innocent child?
Kenneth Patchen
Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers.
George R.R. Martin
She has a smile that grows slowly and then shines, like an angel’s smile.
Philippa Gregory
wash off the journey
Okey Ndibe
When the end comes, I will meet it raging.
George R.R. Martin
An answer is always a form of death.
John Fowles
This haze of blood must subside, the palace must collapse under the weight of the riches it conceals, the orgy must finish and the time come to awaken.
Gustave Flaubert
The world began in hazard and will end in it.
John Fowles
Just we know what we want. Just we can discover our anticipation. Just we can understand ourselves. so find yourself. Invest time on finding yourself rather than investing enrgy recklessly on the undesirable people. Consequently disappointment will lessen and happiness will belimp.
shivangi lavaniya
We believed optimistically that Laurie was a reformed character. I told my husband, on the last day of Laurie's confinement, that actually one good scare like that could probably mark a child for life, and my husband pointed out that kids frequently have an instinctive desire to follow the good example rather than the bad, once they find out which is which. We agreed that a good moral background and thorough grounding in the Hardy Boys would always tell in the long run.("Arch-Criminal")
Shirley Jackson
- Boys my age are boring. They have nothing to say and half of them seem like complete idiots.I was going to say that they didn't improve with age but didn't want to spoil her illusions.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.
Russell Banks