Quotes by Novelists - Page 21

The door was flung open. Maurice Duplay filled it; energetic master, shirt- sleeves rolled up. He threw out his arms, the good Jacobin Duplay, and formed a sentence totally original, something which had never been uttered in the history of the world: “Camille, you have a son, and your wife is very well, and is asking you to be at home, right now.
Hilary Mantel
These stories depressed me. Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.
Mona Simpson
There is a crack in everything
Leonard Cohen
He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that’s for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I’ll be bound – you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?
Gustave Flaubert
Both his voice and eyes had the burning cold of alcohol. His strength no longer lay in his military experience or his knowledge of the map, but in his harsh, impetuous soul.
Vasily Grossman
The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen-mast.
Joseph Conrad
The next time somebody announces that he plans to get Medieval on your ass, tell him you're going to get Renaissance on his gonads.
James K. Morrow
I was a sinner. I knew that without a doubt. But I was not alone. And the night was the accomplice of us all.
William Kent Krueger
Whether the bear beats the wolf or the wolf beats the bear, the rabbit always loses.
Robert Jordan
Do you know, Sandy dear, all my ambitions are for you and Rose. You have got insight, perhaps not quite spiritual, but you're a deep one, and Rose has got instinct.' 'Perhaps not quite spiritual' said Sandy.'Yes,' said Miss Brodie, 'you're right. Rose has got a future by virtue of her instinct.'...'I ought to know because my prime has brought me instinct and insight, both.
Muriel Spark
The perishableness of life...imparts value, dignity, interest to life.
Thomas Mann
It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.
Kenzaburō Ōe
Because from now on, for you, I'll be searching for those moments of always within never/Beauty, in this world.
Muriel Barbery
This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence.
Muriel Barbery
It was one of those moments that no scientist can ever reduce to numbers, try as she might.
Anne Fortier
It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.
John Fowles
I prodded him in the chest with a finger and said, “Look here, smart mouth, I’m getting pretty sick of you already. If you know what’s best for you, keep your trap shut and do as I tell you. I still haven’t forgotten how you pushed my friend into that corpse. So unless you want to end up like that body in the underpass, do yourself a favour and keep out of my face, okay?”“Whatever you say, boss. You’re the boss, boss,” Drake said.“See, there you go again!” I snapped at him.“I’m not sure I know what you mean, boss,” Drake said.“You even say boss like a wise arse,” I shot back at him.“I don’t know what you mean b-” Drake started again.“Did I say you had to call me boss?”“It’s just that I thought…”“Don’t think!” I barked. “Just do as I say and we’ll get along just fine.”“Whatever you say,” Drake said.I glanced at Madison and she was smiling. “What’s so funny?” I asked.“Nothing,” she smiled back.“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realise that I was some sort of freaking comedian. Let’s see ifyou think it’s so funny when another one of those dead kids shows up. Jesus, no wonder you amateurs haven’t caught this piece of scum yet – you’re probably all too busy sitting round cracking jokes andtaking the piss to do any real police work.”“You are funny though,” she half-laughed. “It’s just that when you get angry, your jaw goes alltense and your nostrils flare out at the sides.”“Oh yeah, how very amusing,” I remarked. “I think you two clowns are funny – not ha-ha funny– but fucked-in-the-head funny! Now, if you two have quite finished doing your Laurel and Hardy impersonations, we’ve got a killer to catch!
Tim O'Rourke
people ask me not to go out of league because I know they have a fear that i may get successful
shivangi lavaniya
All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is—marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which . . . is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.
Joseph Conrad
Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.
Jean Genet
The arrogant elimination of the Djaouts of our world must nerve us to pursue our own combative doctrine, namely: that peaceful cohabitation on this planet demands that while the upholders of any creed are free to adopt their own existential absolutes, the right of others to do the same is thereby rendered implicit and sacrosanct. Thus the creed of inquiry, of knowledge and exchange of ideas, must be upheld as an absolute, as ancient and eternal as any other.
Wole Soyinka
Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.
Walker Percy
The gift blesses the giver.
Hilary Mantel
For the first time in his life, Stony felt it. It ran like a hot wire, up from his spine, to the base of his skull. His mouth opened on its own.He wanted to bite. He wanted to bite hard.
Daryl Gregory
I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive.
John Fowles
James does what anybody would do when they see somebody they'd like to know: he ignores the shit out of her.
Imogen Binnie
You revolutionists' the other continued, with leisurely self-confidence, 'are the slaves of the social convention, which is afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the very police that stands up in the defence of that convention. Clearly you are, since you want to revolutionize it. It governs your action, too, and thus neither your thought nor your action can ever be conclusive. (...) 'You are not a bit better than the forces arrayed against you -- than the police, for instance. The other day I came suddenly upon Chief Inspector Heat at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. He looked at me very steadily. But I did not look at him. Why should I give him more than a glance ? He was thinking of many things -- of his superiors, of his reputation, of the law courts, of his salary, of newspapers -- of a hundred things. But I was thinking of my perfect detonator only. He meant nothing to me. He was as insignificant as -- I can't call to mind anything insignificant enough to compare him with -- except Karl Yundt perhaps. Like to like. The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolutions, legality -- counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. He plays his little game -- so do you propagandists.
Joseph Conrad
...he had read von Lambert's book on terrorism, there were two pages devoted to the Arab resistance movement, von Lambert refused to call them terrorists, which didn't preclude, and he had emphasized this, that nonterrorists were also capable of atrocities, Auschwitz, for instance, was not the work of terrorists but of state employees...
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
‎The greatest danger of a terrorist's bomb is in the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.
Octave Mirbeau
I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
Bernard Malamud
He believed that life gives us all a few moments of happiness. For some they last hours or days, for a few lucky ones they last for years. The memories from those moments stays with us forever and turns into a country of memory to which we try to go back for the rest of our lives without ever being able to
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
You are my heart. Even if you are a broken heart
Philippa Gregory
Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.
George R.R. Martin
A pair of starfighters. Jedi starfighters. Only two.Two is enough.Two is enough because the adults are wrong, and their younglings are right.Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last.
Matthew Woodring Stover
Your grandfather was a hero in a war, girls. He wasn't a bad man or a weak man. Maybe he was too old to have a second family, a second wife and your mother and me, so many years after he lost his first. Maybe he was too old to fight anymore, and that's why he let me be taken away. I've thought about this for years and years. All I know is there are no heroes in this world. Not really. Just men and women who become old and tired and lose the strength to fight for what they love any longer.
Joseph Boyden
Heroes in the stories never had to sleep in haystacks, or under hedges. But it was not easy to pretend, anymore, that he was a hero in a story.
Robert Jordan
Hereos. Idols. They're never who you think they are. Shorter. Nastier. Smellier. And when you finally meet them, there's something that makes you want to choke the shit out of them.
Paul Beatty
But heroes, at times, had to be fools.
Steve Berry
There are no heroes...in life, the monsters win.
George R.R. Martin
Charity must be voluntary.
Ayn Rand
It’s easier to donate a few thousands to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence—such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.
Ayn Rand
Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.
George Sand
It's funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside them?
Jean Rhys
Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.
Chinua Achebe
Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.
Hilary Mantel
She was always on her feet. Cooking. Washing. Ironing.
Niccolò Ammaniti
A womanly occupation means, practically, an occupation that a man disdains.
George Gissing
She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing, if you couldn't give yourself?
Émile Zola
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
John Berger
Weary looked at him and shook his head and put the tailgate up and drove down the gravel towards the bivouac, carrying two drunks, who both fatuously imagined, that once in a dream somewhere, sometime, someplace, they had managed for a moment to touch another human soul and understand it.
James Jones
Never stop loving yourself, for how can you truly love someone if you don't love yourself first. And never be afraid to love, for it is one of the most beautiful uglist things of this world.
Adrian Ross
It is hard to die unmourned.
George R.R. Martin
All men must die. We are but death's instruments, not death himself.
George R.R. Martin
If I have to die, then it's best to do so before I see everything I love, the land, the animals, the people, all of it destroyed.
Wilbur Smith
I've seen men die because they were sure that what should not happen,would not.-Robert Jordan(The eye of the world,Wheel of time)
Robert Jordan
But if Frederica was aware of my sentiments, and begged Cousin Alverstoke to intervene—!” She shuddered, and clasped her hands tensely together. “You see, he could, Harry! He could arrange for Endymion to be sent abroad, for instance, and then I think I should die. Oh, my dear brother, there’s no one to help us but you, and I count on your support!
Georgette Heyer
History is biology's dumping ground
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Love is poetry plus biology.
Lawrence Durrell
Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.
Imogen Binnie
In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.
Edmund White