Quotes by Novelists - Page 30

you are so cute she said it's just because of you he replied :)
shivangi lavaniya
Sweet peas were the kind of flowers fairies slept in.
Allison Pearson
Jaime gave her [Brienne] a hard smile. "See, wench? We know each other too well.
George R.R. Martin
Her father had learned only one thing in prison. Not humility, nor patience, nor understanding...Marshall Kofer had learned to listen, at least to his daughter".
John Grisham
My lord father used to say a man should never draw his sword unless he means to use it.
George R.R. Martin
May the Father judge him justly.
George R.R. Martin
A father is the template of a man Nature gives a girl
Allison Pearson
Well, sir, do you mean to remain there, commending my father’s taste in wine, or do you mean to accompany me to Ashtead?”“Set off for Ashtead at this hour, when I have been traveling for two days?” said Sir Horace. “Now, do, my boy, have a little common sense! Why should I?”“I imagine that your parental feeling, sir, must provide you with the answer! If it does not, so be it! I am leaving immediately!”“What do you mean to do when you reach Lacy Manor?” asked Sir Horace, regarding him in some amusement.“Wring Sophy’s neck!” said Mr. Rivenhall savagely.“Well, you don’t need my help for that, my dear boy!” said Sir Horace, settling himself more comfortably in his chair.
Georgette Heyer
I saw my father as a man, and not, as a man who was my father.
Richard Llewellyn
Not even generals can stop the rain.
Jeff Shaara
We'll teach it that the humblest insect measuring out its miserable days by the pug-wuggery and skull duggery of the old Slug of Time is worth far more than this defecating bubble!
John Cowper Powys
I kept glancing at him and away from him, as if his green eyes were hurting me. In modern parlance he was a laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him. And I had always loved him, hadn't I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat?-Lestat
Anne Rice
England is never in a hurry because she is eternal.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
As soon as he was gone, we opened, "Baucis and Philemon." An elderly couple living in a cottage, they're granted a wish by Jove. They confer in private before Philemon asks, "May one hour take us both away; let neither outlive the other." The wish is granted. I said, "Simultaneous deaths? Why didn't they wish for eternal happiness instead? What else would anyone wish for?" "They did wish for that," answered Jamie.
David Guterson
You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I can conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love is its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense.
Thornton Wilder
Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.
Jean Rhys
At five-thirty the rain began to fall in great, heavy drops which bounced off the pavement before they spread out into black spots. At the same time thunder rumbled from the direction of Charenton and an eddy of wind lifted the dust, carried away the hats of passers-by who took to their heels and who, after a few confused moments, were all in the shelter of doorways or under the awnings of cafe terraces. Street pedlars of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine scurried about with an apron or a sack over their heads, pushing their carts as they tried to run. Rivulets already began to flow along the two sides of the street, the gutters sang, and on every floor you could see people hurriedly closing their windows.
Georges Simenon
Human beings say, "It never rains but it pours." This is not very apt, for it frequently does rain without pouring. The rabbits' proverb is better expressed. They say, "One cloud feels lonely": and indeed it is true that the sky will soon be overcast.
Richard Adams
At that instant a dazzling claw of lightning streaked down the length of the sky. The hedge and the distant trees seemed to leap forward in the brilliance of the flash. Immediately upon it came the thunder: a high, tearing noise, as though some huge thing were being ripped to pieces close above, which deepened and turned to enormous blows of dissolution. Then the rain fell like a waterfall. In a few seconds the ground was covered with water and over it, to a height of inches, rose a haze formed of a myriad minute splashes. Stupefied with the shock, unable even to move, the sodden rabbits crouched inert, almost pinned to the earth by the rain.
Richard Adams
When it rains like that, dark in the afternoon, you feel like you've been taken into the past.
Jackie Kay
Raining agen it wer nex morning. Theres rains and rains. This 1 wer coming down in a way as took the hart and hoap out of you there wer a kynd of brilyants in the grey it wer too hard it wer too else it made you feal like all the tracks in the worl wer out paths nor not a 1 to bring you back. Wel of coarse they are but it dont all ways feal that way. It wer that kynd of morning when peopl wernt jus falling in to what they done naturel they had to work ther selfs in to it. Seamt like a lot of tea got spilt at breakfas nor the talk wernt the userel hummeling and mummeling there wer some thing else in it. Like when you see litening behynt the clouds.
Russell Hoban
Misty is the color of rain on a window.
Anne Michaels
The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours’ manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuketo these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just’s cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker.
Hilary Mantel
Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of ’94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.
Hilary Mantel
The happiness of being envied is glamour.Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
John Berger
Oh! do look at Miss Oriel's bonnet the next time you see her. I cannot understand why it should be so, but I am sure of this—no English fingers could put together such a bonnet as that; and I am nearly sure that no French fingers could do it in England.
Anthony Trollope
Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.
George Meredith
A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.
José Saramago
An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children that will never be born (the last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the world already).
Dalton Trumbo
How could you believe or disbelieve anything anymore? Four maybe five million men killed and none of them wanting to die while hundreds maybe thousands were left crazy or blind or crippled and couldn’t die no matter how hard they tried.
Dalton Trumbo
Most argument, and in fact most conflict, has nothing to do with the present. It's always about the past or the future. People can't agree on the details of what has happened or is going to happen. But we rarely know what has happened, and we never know what is going to happen. What is really at dispute is how we will deal with not knowing.
Steven Galloway
My first rule of war, Cat-never give the enemy his wish
George R.R. Martin
Times are not what they were, and we cannot be, either. If you sit and wish for what you want, you may not see it this side of the grave.
Robert Jordan
Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life!
Malcolm Lowry
If I spelled out the Principles of FaithI would be barking on the moon.
Leonard Cohen
Look at her good, Lily," she said, "'cause you're seeing the end of something.""I am?""Yes, you are, because as long as people have been on this earth, the moon has been a mystery to us. Think about it. She is strong enough to pull the oceans, and when she dies away, she always comes back again. My mama used to tell me Our Lady lived on the moon and that I should dance when her face was bright and hibernate when it was dark." August stared at the sky a long moment and then, turning toward the house, said, "Now it won't ever be the same, not after they've landed up there and walked around on her. She'll be just one more science project.
Sue Monk Kidd
The moon was a crescent, thin and sharp as the blade of a knife.
George R.R. Martin
Never drink with Dornishmen when the moon is full.
George R.R. Martin
It was then between one o'clock in the morning and half-past that hour; the sky soon cleared a bit before me, and the lunar crescent peeped out from behind the clouds - that sad crescent of the last quarter of the moon. The crescent of the new moon, that which rises at four or five o'clock in the evening, is clear, bright and silvery; but that which rises after midnight is red, sinister and disquieting; it is the true crescent of the witches' Sabbath: all night-walkers must have remarked the contrast. The first, even when it is as narrow as a silver thread, projects a cheery ray, which rejoices the heart, and casts on the ground sharply defined shadows; while the latter reflects only a mournful glow, so wan that the shadows are bleared and indistinct. ("Who Knows?")
Guy de Maupassant
Like some winter animal the moon licks the salt of your hand,Yet still your hair foams violet as a lilac treeFrom which a small wood-owl calls.
Johannes Bobrowski
Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.
Thornton Wilder
The moon is friend for the lonesome to talk to.
Carl Sandburg
Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care.
John Fowles
...What kind of a tragedy did you have in your childhood?""Why, none at all. I had a wonderful childhood. Free and peaceful and not bothered too much by anybody. Well, yes, I did feel bored very often. But I’m used to that.
Ayn Rand
That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. It’s not malice, or wickedness - well, perhaps it is wickedness, for most women love that - but certainly not malice, not wanting to plague cattle and make horrid children spout up pins and - what is it? - “blight the genial bed.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
She had understood before she had ever dreamed of a city such as this, where every texture, every color, leapt out at you, where every fragrance was a drug, and the air itself was something alive and breathing.
Anne Rice
Lasher,’ she said, ‘for the wind which you send that lashes the grasslands, for the wind that lashes the leaves from the trees.
Anne Rice
One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.
Stephen Vizinczey
There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
Thomas Mann
Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.
Edward St. Aubyn
Is that gallantry I smell, or just stupidity? The two scents are much alike, as I recall.
George R.R. Martin
Unfinishedness avoids the stupidity of conclusions
Pierre Senges
This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.
Gustave Flaubert
If you're gonna be stupid you gotta be tough.
John Grisham
You cannot argue stupidity, you just have to accept it patiently as one of those things.
Nevil Shute
I doubt you can understand the magnitude of the stupidity in your statement
Robert Jordan
You could have done something with newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we'd been wise enough.
Nevil Shute