Quotes by Novelists - Page 51

He became...the ideal of that virtue which delights in its own work...doing everything with simplicity and dignity, for he seemed to realize that his objective added nobility to everything he did.
Honoré de Balzac
…the worshipers here are not likely to kill one another, they all offer the same sacrifice, and how the fat spits and the carcasses sizzle as God in the sublime heavens inhales the odors of all this carnage with satisfaction. Jesus pressed his lamb to his breast, unable to fathom why God could not be appeased with a cup of milk poured over His altar, that sap of life which passes from one being to another, or with a handful of wheat, the basic substance of immortal bread. Soon he will have to part with the old man’s generous gift, his for such a short time, the poor little lamb will not live to see the sun set this day, it is time to mount the stairs of the Temple, to deliver it to the knife and sacrificial fire, as if it were no longer worthy of existence or being punished…
José Saramago
And at once he sacrificed everything to it, if it can be said we ever sacrifice anything save what we know we can never attain, or what some secret wisdom tells us it would be uncomfortable or saddening to possess.
Thornton Wilder
Believe me, it is quite unnecessary! I neither know nor care what it cost to redeem Lufra—and if you badger me on this very boring matter I shall not invite you to go with me when I try out my new team!”There was a moment’s tense silence; then Jessamy raised his eyes, no longer glowing, but uncomfortably austere. “Very well, sir,” he said quietly. “Will you tell me, if you please, what I owe you?”“No, young Stiff-rump! I will not!
Georgette Heyer
I gave him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.
David James Duncan
Well, you have the right to make a sacrifice of yourself, but I'll be damned if I'll let you sacrifice me!
Georgette Heyer
Vidal had his exuberant and stately tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrounded by hills, trees, and fairy-tale skies. I would have my sinister tower rising above the oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and the shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the "Rose of Fire.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
His wits have gone dark as his eyes
George R.R. Martin
Bring a torch, if you've got one. It's as dark as hell and stinks of something far worse than cheese.
Anthony Powell
Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer, we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind, Who is speaking, asked the doctor, A blind man, replied a voice, just a blind man, for that is all we have here.
José Saramago
It’s like those nights when I was a kid, lying awake thinking the darkness would go on forever. And I couldn’t go back to sleep because of the dream of the whatever it was in the cellar coming out of the corner. I’d lie in the hot, rumpled bed, hot burning hot, trying to shut myself away and know that there were three eternities before the dawn. Everything was the night world, the other world where everything but good could happen, the world of ghosts and robbers and horrors, of things harmless in the daytime coming to life, the wardrobe, the picture in the book, the story, coffins, corpses, vampires, and always squeezing, tormenting darkness, smoke thick. And I’d think of anything because if I didn’t go on thinking I’d remember whatever it was in the cellar down there, and my mind would go walking away from my body and go down three stories defenceless, down the dark stair past the tall, haunted clock, through the whining door, down the terrible steps to where the coffin ends were crushed in the walls of the cellar – and I’d be held helpless on the stone floor, trying to run back, run away, climb up----
William Golding
Time For Tea.
Tillie Cole
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
May Sarton
Great men can’t be ruled... The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional.
Ayn Rand
We had these sudden revelations that employment, the daily nine-to-five, was driving us far from our better selves.
Joshua Ferris
Your success in the job market has nothing to do with the job market itself - instead it has everything to do with you.
Simon Gray
In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.
Kim Stanley Robinson
It has always seemed to me that if one falls in love with any gentleman one becomes instantly blind to his faults.But I am not blind to your faults, and I do not think that everything you do or say is right! Only—Is it being—not very comfortable—and cross—and not quite happy, when you aren’t there?” “That, my darling,” said his lordship,taking her ruthlessly into his arms,“is exactly what it s!” “Oh—!” Frederica gasped, as she emerged from an embrace which threatened to suffocate her. “Now I know! I am in love!
Georgette Heyer
At best, love is simply the slipping of a hand in another's, of knowing you are where you belong at last, and of exchanging through the eyes that all-consuming regard which ignores everybody else on earth.
Laurie Lee
The course of true love rarely runs smooth.
Jasper Fforde
Well, sometimes love seems easy. Like ... it's easy to love rain ... and hawks. And it's easy to love wild plums ... and the moon. But with people, seems like love's a hard thing to know. It gets all mixed up. I mean, you can love one person in one way and another person in another way. But how do you know you love the right one in every way?""I'm not sure, but I think you'll know. I think if it's the right person, it'll be better than rain and hawks and wild plums. Even better than the moon. I think it'll be better than all that put together.
Billie Letts
I am boring, but I'm ok with it. I'm the anchor, the shoulder...I'm an average man...with a truly extraordinary wife
Jasper Fforde
And he glanced down at Mercy beside him, and saw in her face such radiant goodness, such a calm certainty, that it seemed to him that if he could only be with her all his life, he should know a love, and happiness, and peace that he had never known before.
Edward Rutherfurd
And on the endless dusty ribbon of the highway, on sunken roads vaulted over by branches, on paths between stands of grain that rose to his knees, the sun on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the night's bliss, his spirit at peace and his flesh content, he would ride on his way ruminating his happiness, like someone who keeps savoring, hours later, the fragrance of the truffles he has eaten for dinner.
Gustave Flaubert
Difficult but worth it-- that's how my mother had once describe life with Omi.
Kamila Shamsie
At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted.I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were being garrotted by invisible cords, I floundered in anguish and dread, oppressively ridden by the most unbridled nightmares. A whole series of monsters and avatars swarmed in the shadows, coming to life amid draughts of sulphur and phosphorus like an animated fresco painted on the moving wall of sleep.There followed a turbulent race through space. I soared, grasped by the hair by an invisible hand of will: an icy and powerful hand, in which I felt the hardness of precious stones, and which I sensed to be the hand of Ethal. Dizziness was piled upon dizziness in that flight to the abyss, under skies the colour of camphor and salt, skies whose nocturnal brilliance had a terrible limpidity. I was spun around and around, in bewildering confusion, above deserts and rivers. Great expanses of sand stretched into the distance, mottled here and there by monumental shadows. At times we would pass over cities: sleeping cities with obelisks and cupolas shining milk-white in the moonlight, between metallic palm-trees. In the extreme distance, amid bamboos and flowering mangroves, luminous millennial pagodas descended towards the water on stepped terraces.
Jean Lorrain
Stubbs may have envisaged the skeleton inside the horse, but most of us do not
Richard Adams
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received — hatred. The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.
Ayn Rand
There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes.
August Strindberg
At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
William Golding
The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.
Leonora Carrington
Still, we permit the appearance of our meats, sauces, fruits, and vdgetables to dominate our tongues until it is difficult to divide a twist of lemon or squeeze of lime from the colors of their rinds or separate yellow from its yolk or chocolate from the quenchless brown which seems to be the root, shoot, stalk, and bloom of it. Yet I hardly think the eggplant's taste is as purple as its skin. In fact, there are few flavors at the violet end, odors either, for the acrid smell of blue smoke is deceiving, as is the tooth of the plum, though there may be just a hint of blue in the higher sauces. Perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. No watermelon tastes red. Apropos: while waiting for a bus once, I saw open down the arm of a midfat, midlife, freckled woman, suitcase tugging at her hand like a small boy needing to pee, a deep blue crack as wide as any in a Roquefort. Split like paper tearing. She said nothing. Stood. Blue bubbled up in the opening like tar. One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup.
William H. Gass
All you do is think. Because all you do is think, you've constructed two separate worlds—one inside your head and one outside. Just the fact that you tolerate this enormous dissonance—why, that's a great intangible failure already.
Sōseki Natsume
But, then, the truest perceptions of life, for me at least, have always proved to be the most elusive and the most shortlived
Arun Joshi
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.
José Saramago
One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.
Anne Rice
Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.""I don't believe in ghosts," I said, faintly."Some people can't see the color red. That doesn't mean it isn't there," she replied.
Sue Grafton
There is strange, and yet not strange, is the kiss. It is strange because it mixes silliness with tragedy, and yet not strange because there is good reason for it. There is shaking by the hand. That should be enough. Yet a shaking of hands is not enough to give a vent to all kinds of feeling. The hand is too hard and too used to doing all things, with too little feeling and too far from the organs of taste and smell, and far from the brain, and the length of an arm from the heart. To rub a nose like the blacks, that we think is so silly, is better, but there is nothing good to the taste about the nose, only a piece of old bone pushing out of the face, and a nuisance in winter, but a friend before meals and in a garden, indeed. With the eyes we can do nothing, for if we come too near, they go crossed and everything comes twice to the sight without good from one or other.There is nothing to be done with the ear, so back we come to the mouth, and we kiss with the mouth because it is part of the head and of the organs of taste and smell. It is temple of the voice, keeper of breath and its giving out, treasurer of tastes and succulences, and home of the noble tongue. And its portals are firm, yet soft, with a warmth, of a ripeness, unlike the rest of the face, rosy, and in women with a crinkling of red tenderness, to the taste not in compare with the wild strawberry, yet if the taste of kisses went , and strawberries came the year round, half of joy would be gone from the world. There is no wonder to me that we kiss, for when mouth comes to mouth, in all its stillness, breath joins breath, and taste joins taste, warmth is enwarmed, and tongues commune in a soundless language, and those things are said that cannot find a shape, have a name, or know a life in the pitiful faults of speech.
Richard Llewellyn
and when his lips touched mine forthe very first time . . . i knew he is theone
shivangi lavaniya
Profoundly moved, he kissed the lax waiting mouth with exquisite unhappiness.
Leonard Gardner
Charles went to kiss her shoulder.-Leave me alone! she said, you're creasing my dress.
Gustave Flaubert
I had kissed her at odd times, in out of the way corners, in the manner of a mountain guide, nothing more.
Guy de Maupassant
...without knowing why, he yielded to the temptation of those lips and flung onto them, eating them, partaking of their sacrament... Eucharist of love with a red host!
Georges Rodenbach
As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.
Gabriel García Márquez
I wished it was raining," he said."I don't need the rain," I said. "I need you.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.
Guy de Maupassant
Try it again," I said. "Kiss me.""No," he said."Kis
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
She could not bear to look at him just now. If she did, she might well slap him again. Or cry. Or kiss him. And never know which was right and which was wrong and which was madness.
George R.R. Martin
Modern scientific accomplishments" --a wealth of methods coupled with a poverty of intentions which, having nearly exhausted the hell-potential of the earth, move on now to the first frontier of the heavens.
Kenneth Patchen
Information age. I guess I'm part of it, even if I can't remember how to use my iPhone from week to week, and have to learn how to send e-mails all over again every couple of years, and can't retain any profound technological knowledge about the computers I sometimes use.
Anne Rice
Americans no longer experience vacations. They simply Sony them so they can ignore them for the rest of the year.
John Grisham
The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!
Wallace Stegner
And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation, the more intensely the author worried about distinguishing himself from the narrator, the more he felt he had become him.
Ben Lerner
An anxious heart is like a string that's out of tune.
Naguib Mahfouz
Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life.
May Sarton
I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you ask them who is brave--who is true--who is just--who is it they would trust with their lives?--they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth....
Joseph Conrad
This island has no secrets, not from me. It loves me, and I love it, and when I paint my face I'm a part of the island. The swarthiness of my face hidden behind the clay and charcoal. I leave behind England, it's not important anymore, our island is all that matters. The rhythm of the hunt, the sun, beats deep in my blood. The littl'uns play, eat, and sleep, there good for nothing and just take up precious space on my island.I couldn't have known a ship would pass at the exact moment my hunters left the fire. We needed the meat. Everything was perfect, the pigs on the mountain, the hunters and our spears, we had to go then. The hunt was perfect, the gouts and gouts of blood, the pigs death screams. But that stupid boat went by, and destroyed my trophy.Then Simon, stupid little Simon, gives the fat belligerent Fatty a piece of meat. He doesn't deserve it, the fat, ass-mar infected, fatty. The know-it-all that says he could do better, he wouldn't he'd do the exact same thing in my shoes. Damn him, damn them all! They should have just taken the meat. Then Ralph stands there and tells me I'm too malevolent. I even apologized. He doesn't deserve to be chief, he's weak. He wouldn't do it, he wouldn't kill. There's power behind the spear, impalpable to people like Ralph. We dominate those pigs. Now that we have found the way to kill the pigs, we don't even need to be rescued. It doesn't matter that there was no fire to signal the ship, because we needed the men for the hunt, and I don't regret it anymore because now we have meat.
William Golding
Remember: You are no one. You have no name. You do not speak, you do not look at them, you do not volunteer for anything. You work, bot not so hard they notice you. Gizela. Zytka. Your parents, Oskar and Mina. They are dead and gone now, Yanek, and we would grieve for them if we could. But we have only one purpose now: survive. Survive at all costs, Yanek. We cannot let these monsters tear us from the pages of the world.
Alan Gratz
Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
May Sarton
The ceremony was fast so we wouldn't be caught. When it was over, the men all whispered 'Mazel tov' and climbed back onto their shelves. I went up to the boy and pressed the wooden horse into his hands, the only present I could give him. The boy looked at me with big, round eyes. Had I ever been so young? 'We are alive,' I told him. 'We are alive, and that is all that matters. We cannot let them tear us from the pages of the world.'I said it as much for me as for him. I said it in memory of Uncle Moshe, and my mother and father, and my aunts and other uncles and cousins. The Nazis had put me in a gas chamber. I had thought I was dead, but I was alive. I was a new man that day, just like the bar mitzvah boy. I was a new man, and I was going to survive.
Alan Gratz