Quotes by Novelists - Page 27

2There is no greater thing in life than that secret sense of harmony that unites us briefly with the great mysteries of others and allows us to travel alongside them for part of the way.
Álvaro Mutis
There is no greater thing in life than that secret sense of harmony that unites us briefly with the great mysteries of others and allows us to travel alongside them for part of the way.
Álvaro Mutis
May the radiance of what you love, manifest in whatever you do.
Shilpa Menon
May the radiance of what you love, reflect in whatever you do.
Shilpa Menon
What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.
Thomas Mann
Need is not transitive, one may need without oneself being needed.
Amitav Ghosh
That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed.
Amitav Ghosh
So long, Lee. Give our regards to the Kaiser. And tell him there's a few boys on 58th Street who'll throw a party for him if he'll drop around.
James T. Farrell
Abroad? Oh no. I went to England in ’91, and you stood in the garden at Fontenay and berated me.” He shook his head. “This is my nation. Here I stay. A man can’t carry his country on the soles of his shoes.
Hilary Mantel
...patriotism has become a narrow offensive sentiment which as long as it lives will maintain war and exhaust the world
Henri Barbusse
The nationalism of a small nation can, with treacherous ease, become detached from its roots in what is noble and human. It then become pitiful, making the nation appear smaller rather than greater. It is the same with nations as with individuals; while trying to draw attention to the inadequacies of others, people all too often reveal their own.
Vasily Grossman
Patriotism is a myth conceived by those old rogues to draw us into the infernal game. Let them fight as they will, but we want no part of it.
Wilbur Smith
The love we have for our native land would be good and praiseworthy if it did not degenerate, as we see it does everywhere, into vanity, the spirit of predominance, acquisitiveness, hate, envy, nationalism, and militarism
Henri Barbusse
I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country, that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black, has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.
Gustave Flaubert
Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land.
Walter Scott
Moreover, there was what Amy called “the cocksuckers’ contingent of the country”—what Danny knew as the dumber-than-dog-shit element, those bully patriots—and they were too set in their ways or too poorly educated (or both) to see beyond the ceaseless flag-waving and nationalistic bluster.
John Irving
Has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from the outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...
William Gaddis
The front room of his house was what I called 'untidy chic'. Prefects weren't subject to the same Rules on room tidiness, but since no one really enjoyed clutter, a certain style of ordered untidiness was generally considered de couleur for a prefect's room.
Jasper Fforde
What is without dispute...is that the readers need [the BookWorld] just as much as we need them—to bring order to their apparent chaos, if nothing else.
Jasper Fforde
Normality; show me normality, señor caballero, and I will show you an exception to the abnormal order of the universe; show me a normal event and I shall call it miraculous because it is normal.
Carlos Fuentes
The birds do not sing, clouds remain of rubber, glass, steel. A stone has lodged in the engine block, the process of rusting has begun. And then darkness, a cold wind, a shred of clothing fluttering where it is snagged on one of the doors which, quite unscathed, lies flat in the grass. And then daylight, changing temperature, a night of cold rain, the short-lived presence of a scavenging rodent. And despite all this chemistry of time, nothing has disturbed the essential integrity of our tableau of chaos, the point being that if design inevitably surrenders to debris, debris inevitably reveals its innate design.
John Hawkes
Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: The realm. Do you know what the realm is? It's the thousand blades of Aegon's enemies, a story we agree to tell each other over and over, until we forget that it's a lie.Lord Varys: But what do we have left, once we abandon the lie? Chaos? A gaping pit waiting to swallow us all.Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some, are given a chance to climb. They refuse, they cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.
George R.R. Martin
The whole problem with people is they know what matters but they don't choose it. ~Secret Lives of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.
José Saramago
The word 'love,' used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphemy taught in our times.
Honoré de Balzac
What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.
John Fowles
And isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison.
Ayn Rand
I content myself with the fact that the general system of our trade is a system of selfishness, is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature much less by the sentiments of love and heroism but is a system of distrust not of giving, but of taking advantage.
Joshua Ferris
Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. They do not waste their energies in considering the good of others.
Ouida
Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect
George Sand
Before you are much older...you will have policemen here to stay. A magistrate will be next. Then perhaps even a jail. And the counterparts of those things are hunger and want, and misery and idleness. The night is coming. Watch and pray.
Richard Llewellyn
What man wants does not matter.
George R.R. Martin
Are you saying,” he asked slowly, “that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?”“Of course.”“That’s not the reaction of most people to being wanted.”“It isn’t.”“Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.”“I feel that others live up to me, if they want me....
Ayn Rand
They’re like chocolate-chip cookies, though. Can’t have just one.
Steve Berry
Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.”“I feel that others live up to me, if they want me...
Ayn Rand
All the while, when Nazneen turned to her prayers and tried to empty her mind and accept each new thing with grace or indifference, Chanu worked his own method. He was looking for the same essential thing. But he thought he could grab it from the outside and hold it against his chest like a shield...Where Nazneen turned in, he turned out; where she strove to accept, he was determined to struggle; where she attempted to dull her mind and numb her thoughts, he argued loud; while she wanted to look neither to the past nor to the future, he lived exclusively in both. They took different paths but they had journeyed, so she realized, together.
Monica Ali
It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair.
Chinua Achebe
Was’ and ‘is’ – in English there is very little difference between these two words. Only one letter more , just two letters different. But it is a lifetime, it is a world of difference. Time does not allow you to take the past along with you. Nothing remains unchanged. Love gets diluted, hate is forgotten and friendship and enmity keep shifting all the time. One day, when you look back, you will ask yourself – what was it all about.
Shashi Deshpande
Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times, or by omission, or by silence, shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.
C.L.R. James
Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?
Émile Zola
We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages.
William Golding
Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization.
Wallace Stegner
To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought.
Robert Graves
And what were the rules at St. Cloud's? What were Larch's rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace--and with what confidence?
John Irving
It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend.And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.Let the fool gape and shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink.But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength.Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go ashore for a howl and a dance?Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you.
Joseph Conrad
You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you find absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
Octave Mirbeau
No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.
Anne Rice
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Ayn Rand
Even fools say something worthwhile now and again. Even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes.
Robert Jordan
Life is mere chance only when one allows it to be
Matthew Woodring Stover
Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.
Tim O'Brien
Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard. You may die before you turn the next page.
John Fowles
Sometimes a crumb fallsFrom the tables of joy, Sometimes a boneIs flung.To some peopleLove is given, To othersOnly heaven.
Langston Hughes
Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
Honoré de Balzac
I must have had some high object in life, for I feel unbounded strength within me. But I never discovered it and was carried away by the allurements of empty, un-rewarding passions. I was tempered in their flames and came out cold and hard as steel, but I'd lost forever that fire of noble endeavour, that finest flower of life. How many time since then have I been an axe in the hands of fate? Like an engine of execution, I've descended on the heads of the condemned, often without malice, but always without pity. My love has brought no one happiness, for I've never sacrificed a thing for those I've loved. I've loved for myself, for my own pleasure, I've only tried to satisfy a strange inner need. I've fed on their feelings, love, joys and sufferings, and always wanted more. I'm like a starving man who falls asleep exhausted and sees rich food and sparkling wines before him. He rapturously falls on these phantom gifts of the imagination and feels better, but the moment he wakes up his dream disappears and he's left more hungry and desperate than before.
Mikhail Lermontov
The passion for defiling things was inborn in her. It was not enough for her to destroy them, she had to soil them too.
Émile Zola
[The wilderness] had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.
Joseph Conrad
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
John Irving
By the time you have a platform for saying what you want, you’ve already become part of the system. It’s how it works.
Ingela Bohm
But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakspeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out.
Walter Scott