Quotes by Novelists - Page 18

The river this November afternoonRests in an equipoise of sun and cloud:A glooming light, a gleaming darkness shroudIts passage. All seems tranquil, all in tune.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Yet the higher a man climbs the further he has to fall.
George R.R. Martin
AUTUMNAL Pale amber sunlight falls across The reddening October trees, That hardly sway before a breeze As soft as summer: summer's loss Seems little, dear! on days like these. Let misty autumn be our part! The twilight of the year is sweet: Where shadow and the darkness meet Our love, a twilight of the heart Eludes a little time's deceit. Are we not better and at home In dreamful Autumn, we who deem No harvest joy is worth a dream? A little while and night shall come, A little while, then, let us dream. Beyond the pearled horizons lie Winter and night: awaiting these We garner this poor hour of ease, Until love turn from us and die Beneath the drear November trees.
Ernest Dowson
The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.
Wallace Stegner
Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.
Rémy de Gourmont
Well, whose opinion did you take?”“I don’t ask for opinions.”“What do you go by?”“Judgment.”“Well, whose judgment did you take?”“Mine.”“But whom did you consult about it?”“Nobody.
Ayn Rand
...Opinion without a rational process.
Ayn Rand
How much better it would be if they weren't so damn understanding--if they kicked me out of the house. To find yourself out in the street with two dollars to your name, to catch the streetcar downtown and get a job, perhaps as an airline stewardess. Think how wonderful it would be to fly to Houston and back three times a week for the next twenty years. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. It would be wonderful.
Walker Percy
He let the hours go by lost in the magic of words, shedding his skin and his name, feeling like another person. He allowed himself to be carried away by the dreams of shadowy characters, the only refuge left for him.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran. We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent without shape.
Ayn Rand
And you wanted to escape,' a man near me whispered to another man. 'You wanted to run off into the woods and fight. But do you see? Do you see what the rest of them think about us? These people would sell you back to the Nazis for a sack of potatoes and then toast you at their dinner table.
Alan Gratz
Anyway, what can one do here? I am seriously thinking of running away and joining the Foreign Legion or the North-West Mounted Police—whichever work the shorter hours.
Anthony Powell
And so, now, it is almost midnight of the first day, and I have broken my resolution to go to bedearly - postponing sleep, and thereby the inevitable waking up in tomorrow. Another device of escape.
Silvia Plath
If I could only escape, if I could only escape... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.
John Fowles
A mountain had died, its skeleton had been scattered over the ground. Time had aged the mountain; time had killed the mountain-and here lay the mountain's bones.
Vasily Grossman
A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.
Edna Ferber
The sawdust flew. A slightly sweet fragrance floated in the immediate area. It was a sweet but subtle aroma, neither the scent of pine nor willow, but one from the past that had been forgotten, only to reappear now after all these years, fresher than ever. The workmen occasionally scooped up a handful of sawdust, which they put into their mouths and swallowed. Before that they had chewed on pieces of green bark that they had stripped from the cut wood. It had the same fragrance and it freshened their mouths, so at first that was what they had used. Now even though they were no longer chewing the bark with which they felt such a bond, the stack of corded wood was a very appealing sight. From time to time they gave the logs a friendly slap or kick. Each time they sawed off a section, which rolled to the ground from the sawhorse, they would say:'Off with you - go over there and lie down where you belong.'What they were thinking was that big pieces of lumber like this should be used to make tables or chairs or to repair a house or make window frames; wood like this was hard to find.But now they were cutting it into kindling to be burned in stoves, a sad ending for good wood like this. They could see a comparison with their own lives, and this was a saddening thought. ("North China")
Xiao Hong
You are a pearl of great price to me, but there are times when you are an almighty trial to those who love you.
Charles Portis
She had not told her mother about Denys, but she had a suspicion that Mrs. Shannon knew all about it nevertheless. It was unlike her not to want to satisfy her curiosity when she came upon her daughter sobbing in various parts of the house. She had asked no questions; she had simply donned the role of the heavily understanding mother, and had done a lot of shoulder-patting and given Mary an expensive evening dress from the shop. Mary had no idea how she knew, but was certain that if she had not known she would never have rested until she did.
Monica Dickens
I was fifteen.I was bored.I was miserable.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Mr Moss's courtyard is railed in like a cage, lest the gentlemen who are boarding with him should take a fancy to escape from his hospitality.
William Makepeace Thackeray
The County Jail looked like a tall, forbidding elementary school. Seven stories of dirty brown brick, one hundred years old and now operating at 330 percent of capacity.
Richard Price
The prose,” Robespierre said. “It’s so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.
Hilary Mantel
Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks.
Naguib Mahfouz
The foreign correspondent is frequently the only means of getting an important story told, or of drawing the world's attention to disasters in the making or being covered up. Such an important role is risky in more ways than one. It can expose the correspondent to actual physical danger; but there is also the moral danger of indulging in sensationalism and dehumanizing the sufferer. This danger immediately raises the question of the character and attitude of the correspondent, because the same qualities of mind which in the past separated a Conrad from a Livingstone, or a Gainsborough from the anonymous painter of Francis Williams, are still present and active in the world today. Perhaps this difference can best be put in one phrase: the presence or absence of respect for the human person.
Chinua Achebe
If you can't bear it, dare it.
Shlomo Reuben
Marriage is an honorable estate and should not be used simply as an excuse for legal intercourse.
Jasper Fforde
Your brother Jaime keeps losing battles. He gave Sansa an angry look, as if it were her fault. He’s been taken by the Starks and we’ve lost Riverrun and now her stupid brother is calling himself a king.The dwarf smiled crookedly. “All sorts of people are calling themselves kings these days.
George R.R. Martin
The man is as useless as nipples on a breastplate.
George R.R. Martin
But you have to understand, mental illness is like cholesterol. There is is good kind and the bad. Without the good kind- less flavor to life. Van Gogh, Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Pink Floyd (the early Piper at the Gates of Dawn line up), scientific breakthroughs, spiritual revolution, utopian visions, zany nationalism that kills millions- wait, that’s the bad kind. Tim Dorsey (Hurricane Punch)
Tim Dorsey
He had not the makings of that honest man to whom success comes naturally.
James Jones
And here, I believe, the wit is generally misunderstood. In reality, it lies in desiring another to kiss your a-- for having just before threatened to kick his; for I have observed very accurately, that no one ever desires you to kick that which belongs to himself, nor offers to kiss this part in another.
Henry Fielding
Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.
Hilary Mantel
Now don't let us give ourselves a parcel of airs, and pretend that the oaths we make free with in this land of liberty of ours are our own; and because we have the spirit to swear them,—imagine that we have had the wit to invent them too.
Laurence Sterne
Great wits jump
Laurence Sterne
I have great affection for you, Roy" I answered, "but I don't think you are the sort of person I'd care to have breakfast with.
W Somerset Maugham
That's what you think of me, is it, girl?" said his lordship, a glint in his
Georgette Heyer
M'sieur, I am as a slave to my wife." He kissed the tips of his fingers. "I am as the dirt beneath her feet." He clasped his hands. "I must bestow on her all that she desires, or die!""Pray make use of my sword, " invited his Grace. "It is in the corner behind you.
Georgette Heyer
You know, the immortality of the soul, free will and all that -- it's all very amusing to talk about up to the age of twenty-two, but not after that. Then one ought to be giving one's mind to having fun without catching the pox, arranging one's life as comfortably as possible, having a few decent drawings on the wall, and above all writing well. That's the important thing: well-made sentences...and then a few metaphors. Yes, a few metaphors. They embellish a man's existence.
Théophile Gautier
Malady of mortality
Anne Rice
Maybe I'll have a tumour like his someday. At first it will be a small but growing sphere that will branch out, growing larger in my stomach like a fetus. I will probably feel it when it starts to take motion, moving inward with the fury of a sleepwalking child, traveling through my intestines blindly -
Gabriel García Márquez
I don't think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is.
Anne Rice
And if I were to open you up - would you see anything less remarkable? Less intricately dazzling, in its squelching, spongy way? Lungs and heart and spleen, and all the rest - ticking away, as it were? Yet you walk down the boulevard, and pass any number of such wonderful devices, all ticking away as they walk, and think it no great marvel.
K.W. Jeter
There is nothing serious in mortality! Solomon in all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace.
Wilkie Collins
As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.
Anne Rice
All the mortal world is a lethal enemy during those hours between dawn and dusk.
Anne Rice
You can't come in, colonel," she told him. "You may be in command of your war, but I'm in command of my house.
Gabriel García Márquez
When your authority comes straight from God, shit always turns ugly.
Matthew Woodring Stover
…the known had been so long dwarfed by the unknown that confusion was an easy bedfellow.
Jasper Fforde
To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.
William Makepeace Thackeray
The comic book is not the book. the graphic novel is not the novel. The same, of course, is true of films and television. When we move a story from one medium to another, no matter how faithful we attempt to be, some changes are inevitable. Each medium has its own demands, own restrictions, its own way of telling a story.
George R.R. Martin
The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it was not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Wells in the doorway in the Third Man.
Walker Percy
But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies that had begun to come out when Roosevelt we
James Jones
Boredom was at the root of Lazare's unhappiness, an oppressive, unremitting boredom, exuding from everything like the muddy water of a poisoned spring. He was bored with leisure, with work, with himself even more than with others. Meanwhile he blamed his own idleness for it, he ended by being ashamed of it.
Émile Zola
What an odd creature you are, Bernard, with your constant fear of death! Do you never have a feeling, as I do, of utter futility? No? Doesn't it occur to you that the sort of life people like us lead is remarkably like death?
François Mauriac
His eagerness had turned into a routine; he embraced her at the same time every day. It was a habit like any other, a favourite pudding after the monotony of dinner.
Gustave Flaubert
But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.
Gustave Flaubert
But even those five-and-forty minutes were too long, the bored me --and boredom is the coldest thing in the world.
Thomas Mann
All men, reaching back to Adam in the Garden, plead Ignorance as their defence; when, if we were but honest, we would admit that the apple was hedged with every warning imaginable. So I too fell; perhaps all sins are not causes but effects, being the result of that first sin, Boredom.
K.W. Jeter
But the boredom of Frau Spatz had by now reached that pitch where it distorts the countenance of man, makes the eyes protrude from the head, and lends the features a corpselike and terrifying aspect. More than that, this music acted on the nerves that controlled her digestion, producing in her dyspeptic organism such malaise that she was really afraid she would have an attack.
Thomas Mann