Quotes by Novelists - Page 57

In the story of the prince and the frog, there’s always a frog. This story ... it has no frog.
Anne Rice
He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?
Joseph Conrad
He clung to the story as to a vow whose abandonment might bring down on his head all kinds of grief and misfortune. He felt very alone, on an interminable day full of evil omens, and the story, though resistant to some of his intentions, was at least a testimony to reality and coherence
José María Merino
I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again life has taught me that my role is to be a witness, not the leading actor.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A night of full moon is favourable to tales of apparitions.
Rómulo Gallegos
It's a very remarkable story.""Remarkable's a well-chosen word. It doesn't give you away.
James Hilton
In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It's a good thing to see that people can heal after they've been broken, that they can change and become something different from what they were before.
Wiley Cash
There are times when we find ourselves pitching downwards, out of control. Yet God is always nearby...
Shirley Corder
God, who knows me by name, [is] right next to me.
Shirley Corder
At the heart of most things that look bad is something that can be good and useful.
William Kent Krueger
I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.
William Golding
She never opened her mail in the middle of the day. Sometimes she forgot about it for a week or more until people rang to complain. Nor did she check her answering machine messages. In fact, it had only been in the last year that she had finally bought an answering machine, and she steadfastly refused to have a mobile, to the incredulity of all those around her, who didn’t believe that people could actually function without one. But Frieda wanted to be able to escape from incessant communications and demands. She didn’t want to be at anyone’s beck and call, and she liked cutting herself off from the urgent inanities of the world. When she was on her own, she liked to be truly alone. Out of contact and adrift.
Nicci French
We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbors. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself.
W Somerset Maugham
I'm watching you, big boy, my eyes say, but his are closed so it's an optical monologue.
Mat Johnson
Staring into someone’s eyes for a long time is psychic. At first it’s very strange and scary - scarier than the first time you have sex. Then you begin to relax, and the person you’re looking at may become very beautiful. As you look into their eyes, you may see them change sex or race. You can see the child in an old person and a young person may appear ancient. Just looking into someone’s eyes for a long time can be trippier than taking acid.
Steve Abbott
Speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being.
Amitav Ghosh
I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.
Thomas Mann
Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.
Guy de Maupassant
It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.
Guy de Maupassant
One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.
José Saramago
Don't care about gods. Gods are irrelevant. What counts is people. What counts is having respect for each other.
Matthew Woodring Stover
...he considered respect for one's given word as a wealth that should not be squandered.
Gabriel García Márquez
I respect him. He has brains and character; and that, I may tell you, is a very unusual combination.
W Somerset Maugham
Though neither happiness nor respect are worth anything, because unless both are coming from the truest motives, they are simply deceits. A successful man earns the respect of the world never mind what is the state of his mind, or his manner of earning. So what is the good of such respect, and how happy will such a man be in himself? And if he is what passes for happy, such a state is lower than the self-content of the meanest animal.
Richard Llewellyn
Relationships are blessings, but they need the manure of love, respect and devotion. A little more would raise expectations and a little less would bring remorse.
Shilpa Sandesh
Putting his head down on the dog's neck, he vowed to himself fervently that he would always have some money on hand, no matter what became of him, so that he would be able to protect all that was truly valuable from the practical people in the world.
Morley Callaghan
Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention.
Carlos Fuentes
...it is not for the illusion of a moment to govern the choice of a lifetime.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.
John Irving
Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they had no choice-as if they were in a space station-
Kim Stanley Robinson
Make no choice, and you have chosen. Failure to decide, because you lack the right, is itself a decision, First Councilor. In abstaining, you vote.
George R.R. Martin
The day my father came to claim me, my mother did not wish for me to go. ‘She is a girl,' she said, ‘and I do not think that she is yours. I had a thousand other men.' He tossed his spear at my feet and gave my mother the back of his hand across the face, so she began to weep. ‘Girl or boy, we fight our battles,' he said, ‘but the gods let us choose our weapons.' He pointed to the spear, then to my mother's tears, and I picked up the spear.
George R.R. Martin
The choices she's made have left her without choice.
Steven Galloway
Neil said to me once that in times of desperation, you have to force yourself to make a decision.It's your choice, he said. Us or them. So choose.
Shirley Marr
You know, kid, ethics isn't about choosing between right and wrong; it's about choosing between grey and grey. It's about choosing between two equally desirable but mutually exclusive courses of action. Freedom or security? Courage or comfort? Self-examination or blissful happiness? Column A or Column B?
Will Ferguson
I don't want to be told that it's the people with power over us who are guilty, that we're innocent slaves, that we're not guilty because we're not free. I am free! I'm building a Vernichtungslager; I have to answer to the people who'll be gassed here. I can say "No". There's nothing can stop me—as long as I can find the strength to face my destruction.
Vasily Grossman
No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.
Ayn Rand
the troubles i faced that time now make me realize i really made the best choice..
shivangi lavaniya
They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring [it] to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single world line of history. The future becoming the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential was so delicious— the way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all...time, combined magically into some superb, as-yet-unseen synthesis— or throw all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of just government. . . .To go from that to the mundane problematic...was an inevitable letdown, and instinctively people put it off.
Kim Stanley Robinson
You have to choose the best, every day, without compromise...guided by your own virtue and highest ambition
Philippa Gregory
Who has a right to tell me I have no gift, no talent, no passion ...' he murmured. 'Why do people say those things to you when youre young? Doesn't seem fair, does it?''No, darling, it's not fair,'she said. 'But the mystery is why you listen.
Anne Rice
It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.
John Fowles
Why are we asked to make the most important decisions of our lives when we are so young, and so prone to mistakes?
Samuel Park
I don't think my mum ever understood my love of Doctor Who. Surely her strongest memory would have been me, standing at the top of the stairs, crying about how the "jelly men" were going to get me? Sorry, Mum, for those sleepless nights, but it was with good reason they called it Terror of the Zygons.
Steve Berry
He seems, in manner and rank, above the class of young men who take that turn; but I remember hearing them say, that the little theatre at Fairport was to open with the performance of a young gentleman, being his first appearance on any stage.—If this should be thee, Lovel!—Lovel? yes, Lovel or Belville are just the names which youngsters are apt to assume on such occasions—on my life, I am sorry for the lad.
Walter Scott
It is vain to try to sacrifice once for all one'syouthful ideals.
Paul Bourget
O youth! The strenght of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! (...) I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret - as you would think of some one dead you have loved. I shall never forget her.... Pass the bottle.
Joseph Conrad
It’s hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they’re disappointed if we can’t share their surprise when they have discovered that a hen lays an egg. There’s a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it’s not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one’s best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It’s not very easy to give up one’s ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do little to resolve them.
W Somerset Maugham
Youth is like a fickle girlfriend. We can't understand or value her until she goes off with someone else, never to return.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something — and you can’t. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little — not a thing in the world — not even marry an old maid, or get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination.
Joseph Conrad
And I’ll look back at him because I shan’t be able to help it, remembering about being young, and about being made love to and making love, about pain and dancing and not being afraid of death, about all music I’ve ever loved, and every time I’ve been happy.
Jean Rhys
The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.
Hilary Mantel
Sitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to shape a mustache of blond fuzz, and when it was all over he looked the same as before, but the laborious process gave Amaranta the feeling that she had begun to grow old at that moment.
Gabriel García Márquez
Merle had the feeling that he almost kissed her, but then his lips only touched her hair briefly, and all she could think of was that she hadn't washed it for days. It was crazy, really. Here they were, all trapped in this accursed sphinx stronghold, and she was thinking about washing her hair! Was that what being in love did to you? And then, was it being in love that was responsible for the lump in her throat and the fluttering in her stomach?
Kai Meyer
For at this stage in our youth we can hold two kinds of anticipation of love, which seem contradictory and yet coexist and reinforce each other. We can dream delicately because even to imagine it is to touch one of the most sacred of our hopes, of searching for the other part of ourselves, of the other being who will make us whole, of the ultimate and transfiguring union. At the same time we can gloat over any woman, become insatiably curious about the brute facts of the pleasures which we are then learning or which are just to come. In that phase we are coarse and naked, and anyone who has forgotten his youth will judge that we are too tangled with the flesh ever to forget ourselves in the ecstasy of romantic love. But in fact, at this stage in one's youth, the coarseness and nakedness, the sexual preoccupations, the gloating over delights to come, are - in the secret heart where they take place - themselves romantic. They are a promise of joy.
C.P. Snow
The feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but it had not been love.
Gabriel García Márquez
A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity—or none at all—with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.
John Irving
But flaming youth in all it's madnessKeeps nothing of its heart concealed:It's loves and hates, its joys and sadness,Are babbled out and soon revealed.
Alexander Pushkin