Quotes by Novelists - Page 52

Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.
Wallace Stegner
Ah, Hannah, you have never longed to live as I long to live if you do not know that another day is the most precious thing.
Philippa Gregory
All around us, Karachi kept moving
Kamila Shamsie
But for the overcrowded, for those who have little or nothing except, sometimes, courage and love, hope works differently. Hope is then something to bite on, to put between the teeth. Don't forget this. Be a realist. With hope between the teeth comes the strength to carry on even when fatigue never lets up, comes strength, when necessary, to choose not to shout at the wrong moment, comes the strength above all not to howl. A person, with hope between her or his teeth, is a brother or sister who commands respect.
John Berger
Claudius, you're luckier than you realize. Guard your appointment jealously. Don't let anyone usurp it.""What do you mean, girl?""I mean that people don't kill their butts. They are cruel to them, they frighten them, they rob them, but they don't kill them.
Robert Graves
Philosophy and religion - what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?
William Golding
A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.
Richard Adams
I survived, but it's not a happy ending.
Tim O'Brien
She resembled the swallow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised up in every age; they obstinately insist on transporting their grains of wheat and they derive a certain exhilaration from the sneers of the bystanders. “How queerly they dress!” we cry. “How queerly they dress!
Thornton Wilder
A sworn sworn owes his liege our service and obedience, but this is madness.
George R.R. Martin
I hope I take up the cause of all oppressed people rather warmly.
Wilkie Collins
He [Eugène Rougon] believed exclusively in himself; where another saw reasons, Rougon possessed convictions; he subordinated everything to the incessant aggrandisement of his own ego. Despite being utterly devoid of real self-indulgence, he nevertheless indulged in secret orgies of supreme power.
Émile Zola
The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man—and he asks no other man to exist for him.
Ayn Rand
I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I’ve always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I’ve always recognized it at once—and it’s the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.
Ayn Rand
All that which proceeds from man’s independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man’s dependence upon men is evil.
Ayn Rand
Your ego is your strictest judge.
Ayn Rand
...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.
José Saramago
I don't want to see you. I don't like you. I don't like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You're impertinent. You're too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure.
Ayn Rand
[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.
Thornton Wilder
Huxley: "Tell me something Bryce, do you know the difference between a Jersey, a Guernsey, a Holstein, and an Ayershire?"Bryce: "No."Huxley: "Seabags Brown does."Bryce: "I don't see what that has to do..."Huxley: "What do you know about Gaelic history?"Bryce: "Not much."Huxley: "Then why don't you sit down one day with Gunner McQuade. He is an expert. Speaks the language, too."Bryce: "I don't..."Huxley: " What do you know about astronomy?"Bryce: "A little."Huxley: "Discuss it with Wellman, he held a fellowship." Bryce: "This is most puzzling."Huxley: "What about Homer, ever read Homer?"Bryce: "Of course I've read Homer."Huxley: "In the original Greek?"Bryce: "No"Huxley: "Then chat with Pfc. Hodgkiss. Loves to read the ancient Greek."Bryce: "Would you kindly get to the point?"Huxley: "The point is this, Bryce. What makes you think you are so goddam superior? Who gave you the bright idea that you had a corner on the world's knowledge? There are privates in this battalion who can piss more brains down a slit trench then you'll ever have. You're the most pretentious, egotistical individual I've ever encountered. Your superiority complex reeks. I've seen the way you treat men, like a big strutting peacock. Why, you've had them do everything but wipe your ass.
Leon Uris
And I realized that I’d tolerated him this long because of self-doubt.
Anne Rice
I do not want to be like a small animal bitten by a snake, going stiff with that poison. I want to bite back.
Yvette Christiansë
Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns--nicht wahr?. . . No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me--how to be?
Joseph Conrad
... that's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.
José Saramago
No, no- the sky will grow dark, cold rain will fall and all trace of the right way will be blotted out. You will be all alone. And still you will have to go on. There will be ghosts in the dark and voices in the air, disgusting prophecies coming true I wouldn’t wonder and absent faces present on every side, as the man said. And still you will have to go on. The last bridge will fall behind you and the last lights will go out, followed by the sun, the moon and the stars; and still you will have to go on. You will come to regions more desolate and wretched than you ever dreamed could exist, places of sorrow created entirely by that mean superstition which you yourself have put about for so long. But still you will have to go on
Richard Adams
My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.
George R.R. Martin
A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.
Elias Canetti
Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
Thornton Wilder
Whose destinies can be in these stars, which appear not to those who inhabit the northern regions?' said Amine, as she cast her eyes above, and watched them in their brightness; 'and what does that falling meteor portend? What causes its rapid descent from heaven?''Do you then put faith in stars, Amine?''In Araby we do; and why not? They were not spread over the sky to give light—for what then?''To beautify the world. They have their uses, too.''Then you agree with me—they have their uses, and the destinies of men are there concealed. My mother was one of those who could read them well. Alas! For me they are a sealed book.''Is it not better so, Amine?''Better!—say better to grovel on this earth with our selfish, humbled race, wandering in mystery and awe, and doubt, when we can communicate with the intelligences above! Does not the soul leap at her admission to confer with superior powers? Does not the proud heart bound at the feeling that its owner is one of those more gifted than the usual race of mortals? Is it not a noble ambition?''A dangerous one—most dangerous.''And therefore most noble. They seem as if they would speak to me; look at yon bright star—it beckons to me.
Frederick Marryat
It doesnot matter; there’s many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us ofa night that mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphereof its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but to theastronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its composition,weight, path--the irregularities of its conduct, the aberrations of itslight--a sort of scientific scandal-mongering.
Joseph Conrad
Betelgeuse, Achenar. Orion. Aquila. Centre the Cross and you have a steady compass. But there's no compass for my ever disoriented soul, only ever beckoning ghost lights. In the one sure direction, to the one sure end.
Keri Hulme
The night embraces me, cool and endless, and above me the stars are tiny holes in the darkness through which the light of eternity is pouring out. I can almost sense primordial stardust flowing through my veins. People are forever telling me that stars make them feel small, and I always nod noncommittally and wonder at the stuffy confinement of their minds. Stars make me feel vast.
Olga Grushin
She wants her cup of stars.
Shirley Jackson
There are more stars than there are people. Billions, Alan had said, and millions of them might have planets just as good as ours. Ever since I can remember, I’ve felt too big. But now I felt small. Too small. Too small to count. Every star is massive, but there are so many of them. How could anyone care about one star when there were so many spare? And what if stars were small? What if all the stars were just pixels? And earth was less than a pixel? What does that make us? And what does that make me? Not even dust. I felt tiny. For the first time in my life I felt too small.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.
Anne Michaels
Why would the stars want to look down on such as me?
George R.R. Martin
I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity.The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.
Pico Iyer
Allah protect us,' Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, 'In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.' In his years in Temur's army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite.
Kim Stanley Robinson
A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in. A minute to smile and an hour to weep in. A pint of joy to a peck of trouble, And never a laugh but the moans come double. And that is life. A crust and a corner that makes love precious, With a smile to warm and tears to refresh us, And joy seems sweeter when cares come after, And a moan is the finest of foils for laughter. And that is life.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth...
Wallace Stegner
Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.
John Fowles
... the sort of smiles used at weddings, turned on very carefully to half pressure to prevent them wearing out.
R.C. Sherriff
My smile is my servant, he should come at my command.
George R.R. Martin
So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.
John Fowles
The prospect Smiler was a manic farmer. Few men I think can have been as unfortunate as he; for on the one hand he was a melancholic with a loathing for mankind, on the other, some paralysis had twisted his mouth into a permanent and radiant smile. So everyone he met, being warmed by his smile, would shout him a happy greeting. And beaming upon them with his sunny face he would curse them all to hell.
Laurie Lee
The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
Jean Genet
I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness. Ultimately, in the history of [the] world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure; axes entering skulls, well, not so much.
George R.R. Martin
It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world.
John Fowles
You don't get it boy... this isn't a mudhole... its an operating table. (KRAKKKKK) And I'm the surgeon.
Frank Miller
The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing.
Joseph Conrad
A bullet leaves evidence that a mortar doesn't.
Steven Galloway
It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were. Then the visible world exploded.
Steven Galloway
You can write the most detailed, vivid description of an ax entering a skull, and nobody will say a word in protest. But if you write a similarly detailed description of a penis entering a vagina, you get letters from people saying they'll never read you again. What the hell? Penises entering vaginas bring a lot more joy into the world than axes entering skulls.
George R.R. Martin
If a cavalcade of organized killing has nothing to teach us, I don’t know what does.
James K. Morrow
Serge nodded. 'And I respect your opinion because you smoke marijuana. You're chemically biased against violence and job applications.
Tim Dorsey
What you love too violently finishes by killing you.
Guy de Maupassant
Everything stayed hidden […] it was all secret – known by anyone who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs Wilson endured on those Saturdays when Dumfermline lost at home(p. 83-84)
John Burnside
Man’s innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed. Totalitarianism cannot renounce violence. If it does, it perishes. Eternal, ceaseless violence, overt or covert, is the basis of totalitarianism. Man does not renounce freedom voluntarily. This conclusion holds out hope for our time, hope for the future.
Vasily Grossman
Some day, my son, you are going to learn that the two greatest joys of being a man are beating the hell out of someone and getting the hell beaten out of you, good night.
Richard Price