Quotes by Novelists - Page 48

This is a work of memory -- facts have been altered. Names have been changed.
Lavinia Greenlaw
To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born.
W Somerset Maugham
I am a product of two worlds and each world has given me a reason to love, be kind and grow strong.
Shilpa Raj
You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.
Anne Roiphe
As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.
Joseph Conrad
The Lord has made us to be creative, and the sense of achievement will help to lift our spirits.
Shirley Corder
She could not descend to an existence where her brain would explode under the pressure of forcing itself not to outdistance incompetence. She could not function to the rule of: Pipe down-keep down-slow down-don't do your best, it is not wanted!
Ayn Rand
Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.
Chinua Achebe
I had to admit that I had a strong tendency to date jokers. I couldn’t say no to them. I would sit across from someone I was dating and try to imagine who in the entire world would date this nimrod other than me. But I always had to have a boyfriend. They distracted me from being sad. They baffled me with their stupidity. I refused to believe that finding love was difficult.
Heather O'Neill
Just because you're in the market for a minivan doesn't mean you can't test drive a hotrod.
Inez Kelley
Happiness is an illusion
ShinigamiGew
But even of him I can think of with sorrow, now at this moment.Those times, those people...have gone. How can there be fury felt for things that are gone to dust.
Richard Llewellyn
She might have wept then, had not the sky begun to do it for her.
George R.R. Martin
Hard it is to suffer through stupid people. They make you feel sorry for them, and if your sorrow is as great as your hurt, you will allow them to go free of punishment, for their eyes are the eyes of dogs that have done wrong and know it, and are afraid.
Richard Llewellyn
As the bell rang he would look back at the departing year. He always found it a moving experience. Sometimes he was racked by sorrow and regret. Even when the sentimentality of the announcers repelled him, the tolling of the bells echoed in his heart.
Yasanuri Kawabata
Many a month of gloomy unconsciousness rolled over me, without date or notice. One thousand waves may welter over a sunk wreck, and be felt as one.
Charles Robert Maturin
I, too, am among those unable to step outside the realm of worldly distinctions. I hide my excesses of joy and sorrow beneath a robe of false contentment and drown in a pool of tears unseen by others. How I envy those naive enough to covet the glory of others. Do they not realize that tears fall not only on the sleeves of worn and tattered kimonos? The jewels that spill, glittering, onto my brocade are the very water of life, but they are mistaken for mere ornament. Although no one notices, my heart is shattered into a thousand pieces.
Shikin Shimizu
Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow.
Anne Fortier
A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.
Françoise Sagan
However, now she was a schoolgirl no longer. She had discovered how to manage her hair, had been to one or two parties and a night club, and laid on lipstick with the idea that each layer was a layer of sophistication.
Monica Dickens
Jacen reflected bitterly that a large part of growing up seemed to involve watching everything change, and discovering that all changes are permanent. That nothing ever changes back. That you can’t go home again.
Matthew Woodring Stover
I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.
Matthew Woodring Stover
You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can't ever bring any of it back again. You just can't.
Tim O'Brien
Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the side walk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your partner was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.
Heather O'Neill
It is said with truth that every building is constructed stone by stone, and the same may be said of knowledge, extracted and compiled by many learned men, each of whom builds upon the works of those who proceeded him.
George R.R. Martin
Stil it takes you strange walking in your old foot steps like that. Putting your groan up foot where your chyld foot run nor dint know nothing what wer coming.
Russell Hoban
We'd drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.
Richard Powers
I felt for the first time, maybe ever, how much harder it was to be the adults. And I wasn't sure I could do that when it was my turn.
Barbara Hall
In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
John Irving
You need some coffee, don't you?""Yes, I've only had a gallon.
John Grisham
Expectations is the mother of all negative energies within in you...
shivangi lavaniya
Strange how this war was making them all Americans.
Newt Gingrich and William R Forstchen
We are like the herb which flourisheth most when trampled upon
Walter Scott
Women have their own braveries, their own mighty courageousness that is of woman, and not to be compared with the courage shown by man.
Richard Llewellyn
Strike hard and true, crow, or I'll come back and haunt you.
George R.R. Martin
Even brave men blind themselves sometimes, when they are afraid to see.
George R.R. Martin
You can tease it's mane all you like, but you can't turn a house cat into a lion.
Anne Fortier
Can a man still be brave if he's afraid? That's the only tine a man can be brave.
George R.R. Martin
It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple
Leonard Cohen
Ah, come now. I look like an angel, but I'm not. The old rules of nature encompass many creatures like me. We're beautiful like the diamond-backed snake, or the striped tiger, yet we're merciless killers
Anne Rice
But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams, a demon elf feeding her spinning wheel with the reeds of the world so she might make her own weblike universe.
Anne Rice
You do not know your vampire nature. You are like an adult who, looking back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, asking for the love and care to be showered on you again simply because now you know their worth. So it is with you and mortal nature. You've given it up. You no longer look "through a glass darkly." But you cannot pass back to the world of human warmth with your new eyes.
Anne Rice
Louis found me in the rear parlor, the one more distant from the noises of the tourists in the Rue Royale, and with its windows open to the courtyard below. I was in fact looking out the window, looking for the cat again, though I didn't tell myself so, and observing how our bougainvillea had all but covered the high walls that enclosed us and kept us safe from the rest of the world. The wisteria was also fierce in its growth, even reaching out from the brick walls to the railing of the rear balcony and finding its way up to the roof. I could never quite take for granted the lush flowers of New Orleans. Indeed, they filled me with happiness whenever I stopped to really look at them and surrender to their fragrance, as though I still had the right to do so, as though I still were part of nature, as though I were still a mortal man.
Anne Rice
I was feeling fear. Not a wild, mortal fear, but something cold like a hook in my side.
Anne Rice
Then Chameroy spoke. 'You always put the blame on opium, but as I see it the case of Freneuse is much more complicated. Him, an invalid? No - a character from the tales of Hoffmann! Have you never taken the trouble to look at him carefully? That pallor of decay; the twitching of his bony hands, more Japanese than chrysanthemums; the arabesque profile; that vampiric emaciation - has all of that never given you cause to reflect? In spite of his supple body and his callow face Freneuse is a hundred thousand years old. That man has lived before, in ancient times under the reigns of Heliogabalus, Alexander IV and the last of the Valois. What am I saying? That man is Henri III himself. I have in my library an edition of Ronsard - a rare edition, bound in pigskin with metal trimmings - which contains a portrait of Henri engraved on vellum. One of these nights I will bring the volume here to show you, and you may judge for yourselves. Apart from the ruff, the doublet and the earrings, you would believe that you were looking at the Due de Freneuse. As far as I'm concerned, his presence here inevitably makes me ill - and so long as he is present, there is such an oppression, such a heaviness...
Jean Lorrain
I wish I could," laughed the vampire. "How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes. No." He shook his head. "That is, how would you say today . . . bullshit?
Anne Rice
I love you!” he bellowed at me and his eyes turned black. “Happy now? I love you, okay? I love youso fucking much that it hurts! It’s driving me insane! I loved you from the moment I saw you doingyour Miss Marple impression in those woods back at The Ragged Cove. But I could tell you weresweet on Luke and hey, why not? He’s the good-looking one, right? I mean, I’m just the hired muscle.I’m the one who gets everyone else out of the shit. But I couldn’t help my feelings, I’d never felt likethat before. So yeah, okay I stole a kiss from you in the gatehouse – big fucking deal! But you knowwhat? That was the biggest mistake of my life, because that one kiss from you drove me out of my tinyfreaking mind! So, I’m sorry if I give the boy a hard time and ain’t too gentle with the girl, but I’m notgoing to sit back and watch you risk your life just so you can blow their noses and wipe their arses!”I looked at Potter and he seemed almost out of breath after his rant. Once he had finished, he put outhis cigarette and lit another one. Standing, I looked at him and said, “Potter, I had no idea…”“Ah, forget it,” he said, waving me away with his hand. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Besides, I’llbe moving out at first light in search of Luke. Once I’ve rescued him, I’ll bring him to you in TheHollows and you won’t have to see me again.
Tim O'Rourke
Being a vampire for him meant revenge. Revenge against life itself. Every time he took a life it was revenge. It was no wonder, then, that he appreciated nothing. The nuances of vampire existence weren't even available to him because he was focused with a maniacal vengeance upon the mortal life he'd left. Consumed with hatred, he looked back. Consumed with envy, nothing pleased him unless he could take it from others; and once having it, he grew cold and dissatisfied, not loving the thing for itself; and so he went after something else. Vengeance, blind and sterile and contemptible.
Anne Rice
... from the classically executed lifelike bouquets, tempting you to reach for the petals that fell on a three-dimensional tablecloth, to a new and disturbing style in which the colors seemed to blaze with such intensity they destroyed the old lines, the old solidity, to make a vision like those states which I'm nearest my delirium and flowers grow before my eyes and crackle like the flames of lamps.
Anne Rice
For what can the damned really have to say to the damned?
Anne Rice
I value my privacy, and if sometimes my actions seem strange or arbitrary or capricious, I do not want them challenged.
George R.R. Martin
The famous courtesan Clarimonde died recently, as the result of an orgy which lasted eight days and eight nights. It was something infernally magnificent. They revived the abominations of the feasts of Belshazzar and Cleopatra. Great God! what an age this is in which we live! The guests were served by swarthy slaves speaking an unknown tongue, who to my mind had every appearance of veritable demons; the livery of the meanest among them might have served as a gala-costume for an emperor. There have always been current some very strange stories concerning this Clarimonde, and all her lovers have come to a miserable or a violent end. It has been said that she was a ghoul, a female vampire; but I believe that she was Beelzebub in person.
Théophile Gautier
Good was above all kind; it was to be gentle. It was to waste nothing. It was to paint, to read, to study, to listen.
Anne Rice
Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die.
Anne Rice
But remember the overall lesson, that your love for others, and their love for you, that the increase of love in life itself around you, is what matters.
Anne Rice
What lurked beneath my fancy frills, behind my quiet unquestioning eyes? Who was I? Had I no remembrance of a warmer flame than that which gave its wintry glow to my faint smile at those who asked it of me? I remembered no one who had ever lived and breathed within my quietly moving form~ The Vampire Armand
Anne Rice
I think we are wise, we English speakers, to savor accents. They teach us things about our own tongue.
Anne Rice
I am the Vampire Lestat. I'm immortal more or less. The light of the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire-these things might destroy me. But then again, they might not.
Anne Rice
Let the flesh instruct the mind.
Anne Rice
Should we put out the light? And then put out the light. But once put out thy light, I cannot give it vital breath again. It needs must wither.
Anne Rice