Quotes by Novelists - Page 23

Three lights should be fine." - Zachary"Aye, well if it wis me, I'd want a bloody lighthoose beacon comin' oot o' my arse." - True MacDonald
Steve Alten
An older, inebriated Scot who looked like he'd been sitting on his barstool all day looked me up and down, then smelled the air. "Heh, neebr, goat a deid an'mal in yer bac'pac, or iz it ye tha' bloody stinks?"My brain took a moment to translate. "Actually, yes, there is a dead animal in my backpack, but I probably stink, too.
Steve Alten
Sheriff, are you suggestin' the victom was kidnapped?""I'm only statin' that, at this time, we have no body, only nonvital body parts...
Steve Alten
I will be the Vampire Lestat for all to see. A symbol, a freak of nature - something loved, something despised all of those things. I tell you I can't give it up. I can't miss. And quite frankly I am not in the least afraid."- Lestat, The Vampire Lestat, p. 532
Anne Rice
One summer at the fag end of the nineties, I had to go out of London to talk to a literary society, of the sort that must have been old-fashioned when the previous century closed. When the day came, I wondered why I'd agreed to it; but yes is easier than no, and of course when you make a promise you think the time will never arrive: that there will be a nuclear holocaust, or something else diverting.
Hilary Mantel
At times it seems as if arranging to have no commitment of any kind to anyone would be a special freedom. But in fact the whole idea works in reverse. The most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come to realize this after they are in the nursing home.
John D. MacDonald
Remember when I moved in you and the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was, "Hallelujah.
Leonard Cohen
And because you not always can keep your eyes shut there comes the real trouble--the heart pain--the world pain. I tell you, my friend, it is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough. . . . Ja! . . . And all the time you are such a fine fellow too! Wie? Was? Gott im Himmel! How can that be? Ha! ha! ha!"’The shadow prowling amongst the graves of butterflies laughed boisterously.
Joseph Conrad
OMG. He's a gift shop, a lamb kebab with mint,/a solar panel poetry machine with biceps. He's the path/through the dark woods, the light on the page, a postcard/from the castle and a one-way ticket there. He's the most/astounding arrangement of molecules ever!/Just look at those tights! An honest-to-God prince at last.
Ron Koertge
Personally I think there is only one thing to do: find the task we have been placed on this earth to do, and accomplish it as best we can, with all our strength, without making things complicated or thinking there's anything divine about our animal nature. This is the only way we will ever feel that we have been doing something constructive when death comes to get us.
Muriel Barbery
Mine is the blood of the dragon.
George R.R. Martin
Killing is no ordinary act,' said the vampire. 'One doesn't simply glut oneself on blood.' He shook his head. 'It is the experience of another's life for certain, and often the experience of the loss of that life through the blood, slowly. It is again and again the experience when I sucked the blood from Lestat's wrist and felt his heart pound with my heart. It is again and again a celebration of that experience; because for vampires that is the ultimate experience.
Anne Rice
A bloody sword is a beautiful thing.
George R.R. Martin
She could see now that some of the grime that covered him was blood. He looked to be six or seven years old. His ribs were showing and his belly sunk in towards his spine, leaving a hollow above his hips.
Shirley A. Martin
What are you?' She asked. He shot her a brief glance and looked away. He stared at the scenery of the pastures and distant rows of trees. She knew he was not going to answer the question. In the brightening daylight, she could see that most of the blood on him was restricted to his mouth and hands. It dawned on her that it wasn't his blood, but the blood of something he had caught and eaten.
Shirley A. Martin
All Knights must bleed. Blood is the seal of our devotion.
George R.R. Martin
Blood calls to blood.
George R.R. Martin
Brick and blood built Astapor, and brick and blood her people.
George R.R. Martin
I wanted to get away from him before he led me into talking, before he made me feel angry, or grieved, or jealous all over again. I did not want to feel anything for him, not desire, not resentment. I wanted to be cold to him, so I turned on my heel and started to walk away.
Philippa Gregory
Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that.
Kenzaburō Ōe
Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.
Honoré de Balzac
Misdirection. False signals. Spreading confusion. This is the Tao of deception.
David Ignatius
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.
John Fowles
I love, therefore I am.
Robert Graves
Man is not to direct or to be directed anymore than a tree or a cloud or a stoneMan is not to rule or be ruled anymore than a faith or a truth or a loveMan is not to doubt or to be doubted anymore than a wave or a seed or a fireThere is no problem in living which life hasn't answered to its own needAnd we cannot direct, rule, or doubt what is beyond our highest ability to understand we can only be humble before it we can only worship ourselves because we are a part of itThe eye in the leaf is watching out of our fingersThe ear in the stone is listening through our voicesThe thought of the wave is thinking in our dreamsThe faith of the seed is building with our deaths
Kenneth Patchen
The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
May Sarton
The first test of ability and intelligence is to find a field of endeavor in which profits are large and risks small.
James Gould Cozzens
...the quickest, efficient, least expensive way to educate a man is to make it painful for him when he is wrong, the same as with any other animal.
James Jones
You don't want captains in the army who know too much or think too much.
Robert Graves
Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
John Irving
I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
Thomas Mann
[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Gustave Flaubert
Speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.
Gustave Flaubert
Though it had no wide reputation, all manner of people frequented 'The Midnight Bell.' This was in its nature, of course, since it is notorious that all manner of people frequent all manner of public-houses - which in this respect resemble railway stations and mad-houses.
Patrick Hamilton
A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking
Anne Enright
Hair of the dog and to keep me company I made a drink.
James Kirkwood Jr.
Somebody tells you they drink because they’re a failure, it ain’t so. They’re a failure because they drink. And they drink because it’s so damn hard not to. But as long as they have a bottle that isn’t empty, they never feel far from being happy.("Bums")
William Kent Krueger
Jon:'What are you doing up there? Why aren't you at the feast?'Tyrion: 'Too hot, too noisy, and I'd drunk too much wine', the dwarf told him. 'I learned long ago that it is considered rude to vomit on your brother.
George R.R. Martin
When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.
C.S. Forester
I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunder
Guy de Maupassant
There Albine lay, panting, exhausted by love, her hands clutched closer and closer to her heart, breathing her last. She parted her lips, seeking the kiss which should obliterate her, and then the hyacinths and tuberoses exhaled their incense, wrapping her in a final sigh, so profound that it drowned the chorus of roses, and in this culminating gasp of blossom, Albine was dead.
Émile Zola
Now I understand why you grow so many flowers."She shifted her head, not understanding.I said, "To cover the stink of sulphur.
John Fowles
The shrub that half concealed her was a malignant plant, a Madagascan tanghin tree with wide, box-like leaves with whitish stems, whose smallest veins distilled a venomous fluid. At a moment when Louise and Maxime laughed more loudly in the reflected yellow light of the sunset in the little boudoir, Renée, her mind wandering, her mouth dry and parched, took between her lips a sprig of the tanghin tree that was level with her mouth, and sank her teeth into one of its bitter leaves.
Émile Zola
They were no longer standing the way he'd stood them, no longer engaged in the glorious basking that overwhelmed him on the headland. They were leaning toward the light now, craning toward it. He’d been dead wrong about the blitheness. The buttercups now seemed to know — to understand with that purely physical knowledge that all living things possess — that something was wrong. Their craning was like a cry: they were calling out with all the body language they possessed for a life or a place they had no minds with which to remember.
David James Duncan
A man should smell of sweat, not flowers.
George R.R. Martin
Endless love and voluptuous appetite pervaded this stifling nave in which settled the ardent sap of the tropics. Renée was wrapped in the powerful bridals of the earth that gave birth to these dark growths, these colossal stamina; and the acrid birth-throes of this hotbed, of this forest growth, of this mass of vegetation aglow with the entrails that nourished it, surrounded her with disturbing odours. At her feet was the steaming tank, its tepid water thickened by the sap from the floating roots, enveloping her shoulders with a mantle of heavy vapours, forming a mist that warmed her skin like the touch of a hand moist with desire. Overhead she could smell the palm trees, whose tall leaves shook down their aroma. And more than the stifling heat, more than the brilliant light, more than the great dazzling flowers, like faces laughing or grimacing between the leaves, it was the odours that overwhelmed her. An indescribable perfume, potent, exciting, composed of a thousand different perfumes, hung about her; human exudation, the breath of women, the scent of hair; and breezes sweet and swooningly faint were blended with breezes coarse and pestilential, laden with poison. But amid this strange music of odours, the dominant melody that constantly returned, stifling the sweetness of the vanilla and the orchids' pungency, was the penetrating, sensual smell of flesh, the smell of lovemaking escaping in the early morning from the bedroom of newlyweds.
Émile Zola
What is a flower? A giant sexual organ in its Sunday best. The truth has been known for a long time, yet, over-aged adolescents that we are, we persist in speaking sentimental drives about the delicacy of flowers. We construct idiotic phrases like "So-and-so is in the flower of his youth", which is as absurd as saying "in the vagina of his youth".
Amélie Nothomb
And that reminds me, Mama! I have just intercepted another of that puppy’s floral offerings to my sister. This billet was attached to it.” (Charles)
Georgette Heyer
Those who won't accept evil never get anything good.
August Strindberg
Good' did not triumph. 'Evil' did not triumph. The two resolved, destroyed each other and created new 'evils', new 'goods' which slew each other in their turn.
Eric Ambler
...or perhaps about acknowledging that life is a delicate balance of great forces, and that good would lose its potency if there was no evil left to fight in the world.
Anne Fortier
Some people would say- you're only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn't matter. But all the evil in the world's made up of little drops. It's silly talking about the unimportance of the little drops. The little drops and the ocean are the same thing.
John Fowles
I had no idea you were capable of such a diabolical plan, Human, my friend, just human, the devil doesn’t make plans, anyway, if men were good, he wouldn’t even exist.
José Saramago
Men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God
John Irving
Don't make another's pain the source of your own happiness.
Mark Frost
The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?
Wilkie Collins
It was gentler here, softer, its seethe the quietest of whispers, as if, in deference to a drawing room, it had quite deliberately put on its 'manners'; it kept itself out of sight, obliterated itself, but distinctly with an air of saying, 'Ah, but just wait! Wait till we are alone together! Then I will begin to tell you something new! Something white! something cold! something sleepy! something of cease, and peace, and the long bright curve of space! Tell them to go away. Banish them. Refuse to speak. Leave them, go upstairs to your room, turn out the light and get into bed - I will go with you, I will be waiting for you, I will tell you a better story than Little Kay of the Skates, or The Snow Ghost - I will surround your bed, I will close the windows, pile a deep drift against the door, so that none will ever again be able to enter. Speak to them!...' It seemed as if the little hissing voice came from a slow white spiral of falling flakes in the corner by the front window - but he could not be sure.("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")
Conrad Aiken
Just why it should have happened, or why it should have happened just when it did, he could not, of course, possibly have said; nor perhaps could it even have occurred to him to ask. The thing was above all a secret, something to be preciously concealed from Mother and Father; and to that very fact it owed an enormous part of its deliciousness. It was like a peculiarly beautiful trinket to be carried unmentioned in one's trouser-pocket - a rare stamp, an old coin, a few tiny gold links found trodden out of shape on the path in the park, a pebble of carnelian, a sea shell distinguishable from all others by an unusual spot or stripe-and, as if it were anyone of these, he carried around with him everywhere a warm and persistent and increasingly beautiful sense of possession. Nor was it only a sense of possession - it was also a sense of protection. It was as if, in some delightful way, his secret gave him a fortress, a wall behind which he could retreat into heavenly seclusion.("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")
Conrad Aiken
Miles smiled. "Can you keep a secret?"Bea snorted. "Did I tell you what you were in for if you married my daughter?""No," Miles conceded."Well, then," she said, as if that settled the matter.
Richard Russo
May knowledge come to us! What is this secret our heart has understood and yet will not reveal to us, although it seems to beat as if it were endeavoring to tell it?
Ayn Rand