Quotes by Novelists - Page 59

It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I'd already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.
Richard Powers
I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.
Wallace Stegner
Mother seemed happiest when making and tending home, the sewing machine whistling and the Mixmaster whirling. Her deepest impulse was to nurture, to simply dwell; it had nothing to do with ambition and achievement in the world...How had I come to believe that my world of questing and writing was more valuable than her dwelling and domestic artistry?...I wanted to go out and do things--write books, speak out. I've been driven by that. I don't know how to rest in myself very well, how to be content staying put. But Mother knows how to BE at home--and really, to be in herself. It's actually very beautiful what she does...I think part of me just longs for the way Mother experiences home.
Sue Monk Kidd
[T]he very color of the air in the place I was born was different, the smell of the earth was special, redolent with memories of my parents.
Sōseki Natsume
It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Walker Percy
You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home
Sue Monk Kidd
Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
Wallace Stegner
Hands burn for a stone, a bomb, to shiver down the glass. Nothing's changed.
Tatamkhulu Afrika
I speak of new cities and new peopleI tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,a sun dropped in the west.I tell you there is nothing in the worldonly an ocean of tomorrows.a sky of tomorrows.I am a brother of the cornhuskers who sayat sundown:Tomorrow is a day.”- Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is not a mere expression of a poet's self, but an enchantment, a spell of the muse, the inspiration. Poetry is thus magic and magic is poetry.
Shilpa Sandesh
Sorrows of Werther William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63) WERTHER had a love for Charlotte Such as words could never utter; Would you know how first he met her? She was cutting bread and butter. Charlotte was a married lady, 5 And a moral man was Werther, And for all the wealth of Indies Would do nothing for to hurt her. So he sigh’d and pin’d and ogled, And his passion boil’d and bubbled, 10 Till he blew his silly brains out, And no more was by it troubled. Charlotte, having seen his body Borne before her on a shutter, Like a well-conducted person, 15 Went on cutting bread and butter.
William Makepeace Thackeray
... time is how you spend your love ...
Nick Laird
Blessed is the covenant of love, the covenant of mercy, useless light behind the terror, deathless song in the house of night.
Leonard Cohen
Blessed are you who circled desire with a blade, and the garden with fiery swords, and heaven and earth with a word.
Leonard Cohen
Though I love your company, your instructions are wasted her. I will always choose the woman who caries me off, I will always sit with the family of loneliness.
Leonard Cohen
There is a wilderness we walk aloneHowever well-companioned
Stephen Vincent Benét
Whether we realize it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favoring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act. Nothing arouses a passion for dogma more than a good antagonist. And the more unlikely, the better. … It’s difficult to hate an idea. … It’s much easier to hate someone with a recognizable face whom we can blame for everything that makes us feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t have to be an individual character. It could be a nation, a race, a group … anything.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The impatient idealist says: 'Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.' But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.
Chinua Achebe
I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind-and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.
Ayn Rand
As Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions.
John Irving
Life itself is a rickety building
William Golding
Let tomorrow cross its own rivers.
William Morris
There's only so much room at the top of the heap. The rest of us are fill dirt.
Sue Grafton
I'm afraid to go into myself and see what's going on in there.
Muriel Barbery
No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to remind myself what an asshole I was?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when he says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.
Hilary Mantel
It appears, from all this, that our eyes are uncertain. Two persons look at the same clock and there is a difference of two or three minutes in their reading of the time. One has a tendency to put back the hands, the other to advance them. Let us not too confidently try to play the part of the third person who wishes to set the first two aright; it may well happen that we are mistaken in turn. Besides, in our daily life, we have less need of certainty than of a certain approximation to certainty. Let us learn how to see, but without looking too closely at things and men: they look better from a distance.
Rémy de Gourmont
As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.
Rémy de Gourmont
You were contemplating the mountain, Mr. Conway?" Came the inquiry."Yes, it's a fine sight. It has a name, I suppose?""It is called Karakal""I don't think I've ever heard of it. Is is very high?""Over twenty-eight thousand feet.""Indeed? I didn't realize there would be anything on that scale outside the Himalayas. Has it been properly surveyed? Whose are the measurements?""Whose would you expect, my dear sir? Is there anything incompatible between monasticism and trigonometry?
James Hilton
Everything in life is nonsense. It's just a question of perspective.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed.
William Kent Krueger
Milk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it, but the domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it. A swollen udder is very uncomfortable
W Somerset Maugham
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
John Irving
Her son would be incomparably handsome, good and powerful. He would be the expected Messiah; it is fortunate for humanity that all mothers have this pathetic faith, without it mankind would not have the ever-renascent strength to go on living.
Émile Zola
Look back, and smile on perils past!
Walter Scott
If we have any role at all, I think it’s the role of optimism, not blind or stupid optimism, but the kind which is meaningful, one that is rather close to that notion of the world which is not perfect, but which can be improved. In other words, we don’t just sit and hope that things will work out; we have a role to play to make that come about.
Chinua Achebe
Everyone tries to be an optimist. But being an optimist is a bit boring and not honest. Losers are more interesting than winners.
Xiaolu Guo
Come, my men! never say die while there's a shot in the locker.
Frederick Marryat
I said, 'Yes theres a lot to look a head to. Like croaking iron at Widders Dump. We do the croaking and they get the iron.'He said, 'Riddley theres other things to do as wel.'I said, 'Yes and they all smel of cow shit dont they?
Russell Hoban
My optimism? Where I grew up our principal cultural expression was the funeral. Whatever keeps me going, it isn't optimism.
Robert Stone
I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.
Carlos Fuentes
But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.
Edna Ferber
In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning
Carl Sandburg
One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
Wallace Stegner
I will be the first to admit that I am a pessimist by nature. It is, after all, the wisest way to be. We pessimists have everything to gain, whereas optimists have a fifty-fifty chance of being disappointed.
Tamar Myers
Always something new, always something I didn't expect, and sometimes it isn't horrible.
Robert Jordan
You can never know enough about your characters
W Somerset Maugham
Stories worked much the same way…A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.
Richard Russo
We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.
Kamila Shamsie
No,” said Bran. “I haven’t. And if I have it doesn’t matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she’d told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.
George R.R. Martin
There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.
Ciaran Carson
I picked up a snake once. In Italy.""Why did you do that?""For a bet.""Was it poisonous?""We didn't know. That was the point of the bet.""Did it bite you?""Of course.""Why of course?""It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?
Hilary Mantel
…what your life means depends on how you tell the story.
Matthew Woodring Stover
Wishes are sometimes just stories that have nowhere to go.
Yvette Christiansë
The story of a man's soul, however trivial, can be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation
Mikhail Lermontov
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.
Niall Williams
Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.
John Berger
If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.
Niall Williams
Most of the stories you hear about dragons are fodder for fools.
George R.R. Martin
I know that I too could try a story out, rebuild mine, make it live again several minutes before the full of the day, the sun, the city. But I haven't the strength, stupidly. I rise and carry on. One more time.
Danielle Collobert