Quotes by Novelists - Page 29

All right. They’re on our left. They’re on our right. They’re in front of us, they’re behind us. They can’t get away this time’.
Jeff Shaara quoting Colonel "Chesty" Puller
My father says there are more than twenty thousand turned out for the king. It seems that most men think that we will win, that York will be captured and killed, though the king in his tender heart has said he will forgive them all if they will surrender.~Will there be another battle?~Unless York decides he cannot face the king in person. It is one sort of sin to kill your friends and cousins, quite another to order your bowmen to fire at the king's banner and him beneath it. What if the king is killed in battle? What if York brings his broadsword down on the king's sanctified head?
Philippa Gregory
Military men are the scourges of the world.
Guy de Maupassant
Her only shame was that she felt none.
Nicholas Evans
I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn't like feeling like that.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Prose divides shame into stations.
Wayne Koestenbaum
He restrained himself from another wisecrack, infinitesimally but with great effort attempting to close down his nightclub approach to education; every positive change in his life, every minute increment in character, acquired more or less through shame.
Richard Price
Many a man has been ashamed of his wicked attempts, when he has been repulsed, that would never have been ashamed of them, had he succeeded.
Samuel Richardson
Why does shame and self-loathing become cruelty to the innocent ?
Anne Rice
Charity you can give even when you haven't got.
Bernard Malamud
Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.
Thomas Mann
I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of "coffee shops" as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.
Edmund White
It's funny how you wanna leave them but still you give yourself every reason not to...
shivangi lavaniya
You're a miracle, Walker. Your fingers are. Your toes are. Your crushing sadness and guilt are.
Ron Koertge
JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN'T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM RIGHT!" [Owen Meany] said crossly. "LOOK AT THOSE WEIRDO TV MIRACLE-WORKERS--THEY'RE TRYING TO GET PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IN MAGIC! BUT THE REAL MIRACLES AREN'T ANYTHING YOU CAN SEE--THEY'RE THINGS YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE WITHOUT SEEING. IF SOME PREACHER'S AN ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST!
John Irving
It was to be a day of queer experiences. He had never realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged.
Walter de la Mare
To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others.
François Mauriac
After a few months she left off speculating about the villagers. She admitted that there was something about them which she could not fathom, but she was content to remain outside the secret, whatever it was. She had not come to Great Mop to concern herself with the hearts of men. Let her stray up the valleys, and rest in the leafless woods that looked so warm with their core of fallen red leaves, and find out her own secret, if she had one; with autumn it might come back to question her. She wondered. She thought not. She felt that nothing could ever again disturb her peace. Wherever she strayed the hills folded themselves round her like the fingers of a hand.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
This was what was wrong with me. All this time I had been trying to figure out the secrets of the universe, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart. All of the answers had always been so close and yet I had always fought them without even knowing it. From the minute I'd met Dante, I had fallen in love with him. I just didn't let myself know it, think it, feel it. My father was right. And it was true what my mother said. We all fight our own private wars.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
He knows different now. It's the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumor that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn't enough for him to take Bilney's life away; he had to take his death too.
Hilary Mantel
...his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking
George R.R. Martin
No, little one, George's ghost won't come back. Human beings don't have souls. No soul, no ghost. Simple.""How can you say that?" protested Mopple. "We don't know whether humans have souls or not.""Every lamb knows that your soul is in your sense of smell. And human beings don't have very good noses." Maude herself had an excellent sense of smell, and often thought about the problem of souls and noses."So you'd only see a very small ghost. Nothing to be afraid of.
Leonie Swann
I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.
Jean Rhys
I am consoled only to see that I was not mistaken: Chicago is just as I remembered it. I was here twenty five years ago. My father brought me and Scott up to see the Century of Progress and once later to the World Series. Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place. I could have been wrong: it could have been nothing of the sort, not the memory of a place but the memory of being a child. But one step out into the brilliant March day and there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place Which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. Until now, one genie-soul and only one ever proved too strong for me: San Francisco—up and down the hills I pursued him, missed him and was pursued, by a presence, a powdering of fall gold in the air, a trembling brightness that pierced to the heart, and the sadness of coming at last to the sea, the coming to the end of America. Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. Knowing all about genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and the Wilderness and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk abroad by day and are more real than people, he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he step off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco than he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder.
Walker Percy
Ghosts!—They exist, they exist! Dead things playing at being alive.
Arthur Schnitzler
During the luncheon he paid attention to no one except his own phantoms.
Gabriel García Márquez
Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time
Anne Michaels
You know what the worst thing about adults is? ...They're not always adults. But that's what I like about them.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The Consul looked at the sun. But he had lost the sun: it was not his sun. Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face; he did not want to go anywhere near it, least of all, sit in its light, facing it.
Malcolm Lowry
The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam.
Joseph Conrad
It was one of those bitter mornings when the whole of nature is shiny, brittle, and hard, like crystal. The trees, decked out in frost, seem to have sweated ice; the earth resounds beneath one's feet; the tiniest sounds carry a long way in the dry air; the blue sky is bright as a mirror, and the sun moves through space in icy brilliance, casting on the frozen world rays which bestow no warmth upon anything.
Guy de Maupassant
And of a Sunday swarm the folkUnder the honeysuckle vine, Quaffing, the while they talk and smoke, The sun, the melody, the wine.
Théophile Gautier
I am alive, and drunk on sunlight.
George R.R. Martin
No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man.There can be no such thing as " the right to enslave .
Ayn Rand
It's just that life felt the right size in there... not too big and not too small. Wasn't so hard to work up a bit of courage. It's got so bloody complicated since then.
Athol Fugard
Let all things be done in order, with right and decency. Those things are worth a man's life or two. Life without would be a hell, indeed.
Richard Llewellyn
...he had acquired the conviction that one had to concern oneself with the rational, not the insane—that one had to seek that which was right, because the right answer always won—that the senseless, the wrong, the monstrously unjust could not work, could not succeed, could do nothing but defeat itself.
Ayn Rand
Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.
Ayn Rand
She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary.
Ayn Rand
Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!
Émile Zola
...he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.
Ayn Rand
The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear.
Ayn Rand
He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.
Ayn Rand
I gaze forward without fear.
Alexander Pushkin
The hound and hare were both so wearied that the peasant got them all.
Luo Guanzhong
Just introduce a woman, conspiracies succeed; Of soldiers, or their weapons, there really is no need.
Luo Guanzhong
There is sitting and there is sitting. (...) Each one waits for the other to move, but the lion is poised, his tail twitching, while the fawn is frozen by fear, bowels turned to belly. No matter which way he bounds, the lion will have him, and he knows it.
George R.R. Martin
One man on the wall is worth ten beneath it.
George R.R. Martin
Always leave a way out, unless you really want to find out how hard a man can fight when he’s nothing to lose.
Robert Jordan
Illusions connected with religion are generally most difficult to remove.
John Meade Falkner
she is an illusion... she can fake everything... you may feel she don't have emotions but may be she is the most emotional one...
shivangi lavaniya
Not that I'm complaining. It was better than my old dream, where Harma Dogshead was feeding me to her pigs.""Harma's dead." Jon said."But not the pigs. They look at me the way Slayer used to look at ham. Not to say that the wildlings mean us harm. Aye, we hacked their gods apart and made them burn the pieces, but we gave them onion soup. What's a god compared to a nice bowl of onion soup? I could do with mine myself.
George R.R. Martin
Why do the Gods make kings and queens if not to protect the ones who can't protect themselves?
George R.R. Martin
Good and evil have nothing to do with gods. It has to do with us.
Matthew Woodring Stover
Joe has sense enough to knowHe is a god.So many gods don't know.
Langston Hughes
What sort of gods make rats and plagues and dwarfs?
George R.R. Martin
Arya did not dare [take a bath], even though she smelled as bad as Yoren by now, all sour and stinky. Some of the creatures living in her clothes had come all the way from Flea Bottom with her; it didn’t seem right to drown them.
George R.R. Martin
Dorothy scratched her dark head, yawning wide, and white feathers floated out of her hair.
Laurie Lee
I wonder if he’d been as beautiful as Dante. And I wondered why I thought that.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz