Quotes by Novelists - Page 24

The deeply secretive cannot grasp that protecting your secret too fiercely exposes it.
Kai Ashante Wilson
It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share.
Ayn Rand
... secrecy adds a charm to an amour ...
Frederick Marryat
The old blood is indeed still strong in the Two Rivers.
Robert Jordan
In this world the weak are the victims of the strong.
George R.R. Martin
I am strong, but I am tired, Stephen, tired of always having to be the strong one, of always having to do the right thing.
Brenda Joyce
He gave up. He'd been feeling like giving up for a long, long time. I guess it's maturity, they say it always gets you in the end. I don't seem to have any more principles left, so it's got to be maturity... A broken man, I guess that's what you become, the moment you are no longer a kid.
Romain Gary
Venerable age had not, for him, arranged that derelict landscape against which it is privileged to sit and pick its nose, break wind, and damn the course of youth groping among the obstacles erected, dutifully, by its own hands earlier, along the way of that sublime delusion known as the pursuit of happiness. Not to be confused with the state of political bigotry, mental obstinacy, financial security, sensual atrophy, emotional penury, and spiritual collapse which, under the name “maturity”, animated lives around him, it might be said that Reverend Gwyon had reached maturity.
William Gaddis
Mary, it must be remembered, was very nearly of the same age as Frank; but, as I and others have so often said before, 'Women grow on the sunny side of the wall.
Anthony Trollope
Wine is the refined jewel that only a grown woman will prefer to the sparkling trinkets adored by little girls.
Muriel Barbery
Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
Walker Percy
Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
John Irving
Don't you dare call me arrogant!If ever I had any at all-which I deny!- how much could I possibly have left after having been ridden over rough-shod by you and Thomas, do you imagine?
Georgette Heyer
The dark realization came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn't imagine when it would end. [Puberty]
Alberto Moravia
Do you know what dead skin looks like when they take off a cast?That was my life, all that dead skin. It was strange to feel like the Ari I used to be. Except that wasn’t totally true. The Ari I used to be didn’t exist anymore. And the Ari I was becoming? He didn’t exist yet.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the waters. I love also absolute, profound silence, and, in short, I love everything that is around me, no matter where I am.
George Sand
Indeed, I have observed one ingredient, somewhat necessary in a man’s composition towards happiness, which people of feeling would do well to acquire; a certain respect for the follies of mankind: for there are so many fools whom the opinion of the world entitles to regard, whom accident has placed in heights of which they are unworthy, that he who cannot restrain his contempt or indignation at the sight will be too often quarrelling with the disposal of things to relish that share which is allotted to himself. 
Henry MacKenzie
I didn't feel like I was missing anything. Nor did I feel ambitious any more. It all seemed stupid wanting to be better than the others in the same ring, shallow, pointless.
Jackie Kay
The two women sat by the fire, tilting their glasses and drinking in small peaceful sips. The lamplight shone upon the tidy room and the polished table, lighting topaz in the dandelion wine, spilling pools of crimson through the flanks of the bottle of plum gin. It shone on the contented drinkers, and threw their large, close-at-hand shadows upon the wall. When Mrs Leak smoothed her apron the shadow solemnified the gesture as though she were moulding an universe. Laura's nose and chin were defined as sharply as the peaks peaks on a holly leaf.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
...that this monster, who is only one in form, has a heart so humane that he should not be persecuted for a deformity which he refrains from rendering more hideous by his actions...
Gabrielle Suzanne Barbot De Villeneuve
And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.
Sue Monk Kidd
The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who can app|y it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialtsts?
John Berger
Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.
John Fowles
She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, feeling no desire to move or think or know that there was any time beyond this moment.
Ayn Rand
The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.
C.L.R. James
The poor are very well off, at least the agricultural poor, very well off indeed. Their incomes are certain, that is a great point, and they have no cares, no anxieties; they always have a resource, they always have the House. People without cares do not require as much food as those whose life entails anxieties. See how long they live!
Benjamin Disraeli
Poor men ... always make love better than those who are rich, because, having less to care about, and not being puffed up with their own consequence, they are not so selfish and think much more of the lady than of themselves.
Frederick Marryat
Most of them had not understood Blackberry's discovery of the raft and at once forgot it.
Richard Adams
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
Ben Lerner
Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They’ve already lived their lives.
Edmund White
I love you, Julie. I loved you that first moment when I looked across the restauraunt and found you. Then you were the loveliest thing I'd ever seen; but now I've discovered how much more you are; loyal and courageous and as true as steel. There's laughter in you and a capacity to love. Julie, Julie, could you learn to love me?
Emilie Baker Loring
My husband's personality was filled with serenity and sunlight. Not even the incurable illness which fell upon him soon after our marriage could long cloud his brow. On the very night of his death he took me in his arms, and during the many months when he lay dying in his wheel chair, he often said jokingly to me: 'Well, have you already picked out a lover?' I blushed with shame. 'Don't deceive me,' he added on one occasion, 'that would seem ugly to me, but pick out an attractive lover, or preferably several. You are a splendid woman, but still half a child, and you need toys.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Americans are so tightly wound, the way they kill themselves to get ahead. It's no way to live, I tell you.
Shilpi Somaya Gowda
Plainly, she is quite besotted by him,... a girl, a young girl, and she is falling in love for the first time in her life. ...little Kitty Howard at a loss, stumbling in her speech, blushing like a rose, thinking of someone else and not herself is to see a girl become a woman.
Philippa Gregory
I’ll listen if you want me to... But I think I should tell you now that nothing you can say will make any difference. If you don’t mind that, I don’t mind listening.
Ayn Rand
His head was on one side, listening to me, and that was such sweeness to me, that he listened intently. No one, it seemed, has ever listened like he does.
Sue Woolfe
No star fades faster than that of a high school athlete.
John Grisham
Well, I wasn't going to abuse him. I was only going to ask: Is there any quality which distinguishes his work from that of twenty struggling writers one could name? Of course not. He's a clever, prolific man; so are they. But he began with money and friends; he came from Oxford into the thick of advertised people; his name was mentioned in print six times a week before he had written a dozen articles. This kind of thing will become the rule. Men won't succeed in literature that they may get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in literature.
George Gissing
Comfort me by a solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see.
Henry Fielding
A person who's going to be famous usually drops a few clues by the time they're twenty-one.
Frank D. Gilroy
The ovation roared around him. He felt nothing in particular, hardly even the embarrassment he had feared. He had to go up again—this time without Fräulein Gasteiner, and it was a little peculiar to him to hear the noise of clapping hands and the loud shouts of "Bravo". He bowed several times, turned to the door and then, just as the clapping was getting weaker, he heard a voice from slightly behind him, or to the side—he couldn't quite tell—but the words were perfectly distinct, no matter how quietly they had been said: "Poor devil!" He wanted to look around, but he felt that that would seem absurd.
Arthur Schnitzler
I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know.
Niall Williams
I was always moved when mean people were suddenly nice to me. It was a weakness that would lead me into some bad relationships later in life.
Heather O'Neill
The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.
Charles Portis
Each day is a dry leaf, which never comes back to life again.
Shine Syamaladevi
Edward, Edward," he said with a patronising smile, "there are no unanswered questions of any relevance. Every question that we need to ask has been answered fully. If you can't find the correct answer then you are obviously asking the wrong question.
Jasper Fforde
Florentino Ariza always forgot when he should not have that women, and Prudencia Pitre more than any other, always think about the hidden meanings of questions more than about the questions themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
War hath no fury like a non-combatant.
Charles Edward Montague
The critics greeted this book with a churlish and horrified outcry. Certain virtuous people, in newspapers no less virtuous, made a grimace of disgust as they picked it up with the tongs to throw it into the fire. Even the minor literary reviews, the ones that retail nightly the tittle-tattle from alcoves and private rooms, held their noses and talked of filth and stench. I am not complaining about this reception; on the contrary I am delighted to observe that my colleagues have such maidenly susceptibilities.
Émile Zola
... it's pointless to think in moral terms when everything is permissible. We have become the people we detest. We have lost the capacity to imagine what is forbidden We have been freed, in other words, from our own hypocrisy.
Eric Gamalinda
Anyone who sang the praises of undying love in this day and age belonged to the first rank of hypocrites in Daisuke's estimate.
Sōseki Natsume
You sanctimonious philistines, who scoff at me!What has your politics fed onsince you've been ruling the world?On butchery and murder!
Charles de Coster
They were so absorbed in their plotting that they did not hear Boule de Suif return. But the Comte's whispered 'shh!' made them all look up. There she was. A sudden silence fell, and at first a feeling of embarrassment prevented them from speaking to her. At last, however, the Comtesse, more of an adept than the rest in social duplicity, asked her: 'Did you enjoy the christening?
Guy de Maupassant
While they were dancing, the buoyancy that the champagne had given her left her all at once, and she slumped and felt suddenly tired and miserable about all the things that Denys should have said and done and hadn't. At the end of the dance there was one awful moment when she was bored. She didn't want to go and be kissed in the garden, she didn't want to drink any more, and Denys was in no mood for conversation; what was there to do? She was bored. It was a terrible, treacherous thought to feel like that when you were with someone you loved.
Monica Dickens
Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fin
Gustave Flaubert
Disappointment to a noble soul is what cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies, but never destroys it.
Eliza Tabor Stephenson
... My mother, daroga, my poor, unhappy mother would never... let me kiss her... She used to run away... and throw me my mask!... Nor any other woman... ever, ever!... Ah, you can understand, my happiness was so great, I cried. And fell at her feet, crying... and I kissed her feet... her little feet... crying. You're crying, too, daroga... and she cried also... the angel cried!...
Gaston Leroux
Your tears come easy, when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.
Wilkie Collins
We are born crying, and for good reason,' he reflected. 'And the rest of our lives is bound to be a muted reiteration of that cry.
Françoise Sagan