Quotes by Novelists - Page 6

The world the Citadel is building has no place in it for sorcery or prophecy or glass candles, much less for dragons.
George R.R. Martin
Be careful you don't cut yourself. The edges are sharp enough to shave with.''Girls don't shave', Arya said.'Maybe they should. Have you ever seen the septa's legs?
George R.R. Martin
The clock sweats out each minuteof what meat is left to us.
Joseph Bathanti
Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
They hate you because you act like you're better than they are...." "[they are] Four that you humiliated in the yard. Four who are probably afraid of you. I’ve watched you fight. It’s not training with you. Put a good edge on your sword, and they’d be dead meat; you know it, I know it, they know it. You leave them nothing. You shame them. Does that make you proud?
George R.R. Martin
I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade.
Jasper Fforde
Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that?
John Fowles
That's what you get,' he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, 'when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains.
K.W. Jeter
There are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension.--"Wanda
Ouida
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."]
Guy de Maupassant
I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.
Sue Monk Kidd
The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.
Sōseki Natsume
Get black on white.
Guy de Maupassant
Le vin est la gaieté, dit-on ; comment cet océan de vin qui submerge la commune de Bercy n’égaye-t-il pas un peu ces navrants paysages ? Tout Bacchus est là ; Bacchus, chanté avec tant de constance par nos poètes ébriolants. Bacchus ne peut-il rasséréner ces horizons en deuil ? ou faut-il croire que Bacchus lui-même, ennemi de l’eau, est incommodé par le voisinage de la rivière ?
Paul Féval père
In summer the empire of insects spreads.
Adam Zagajewski
so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos...So ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack in everythingThat’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
first of all nothing will happen and a little laternothing will happen again
Leonard Cohen
Don't ruin a relationship, by giving it a name.A potential lover. A lover of the present and An ace of the past.These months, years and ages, might just forget the memory And remember the terms you used to file them in a draft.
Shillpi S Banerrji
The day he came home from the hospital, he cried. I held him. I thought he would never stop.I knew that a part of him would never be the same.They cracked more than his ribs.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love.
Gustave Flaubert
I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.
Joseph Conrad
Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels.Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart.
Simon Armitage
Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.
Herman Wouk
I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.
Joseph Conrad
There is nothing more amazing than being with the one you love.
Shilpi
As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
Gustave Flaubert
He had taken George, my beloved George, from me. And he had taken my other self: Anne.
Philippa Gregory
What d'you suppose I care if I'm a gentleman or not? If I were a gentleman I shouldn't waste my time with a vulgar slut like you.
W Somerset Maugham
The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly--we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone's life. I may list things that might be described as my accomplishments in these few pages, but they are only shadows of the larger truth, fragments separated from the whole cycle of becoming. And if I can tell an old-time story now about a man who is walking about, waudjoset ndatlokugan, a forest lodge man, alesakamigwi udlagwedewugan, it is because I spent many years walking about myself, listening to voices that came not just from the people but from animals and trees and stones.
Joseph Bruchac
In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.
Gustave Flaubert
Away with them, away; we should not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good. Think of them as persons from the fairy wood.
Stevie Smith
We are here in a wood of little beeches: And the leaves are like black lace Against a sky of nacre. One bough of clear promise Across the moon. It is in this wise that God speaketh unto me. He layeth hands of healing upon my flesh, Stilling it in an eternal peace, Until my soul reaches out myriad and infinite hands Toward him, And is eased of its hunger. And I know that this passes: This implacable fury and torment of men, As a thing insensate and vain: And the stillness hath said unto me, Over the tumult of sounds and shaken flame, Out of the terrible beauty of wrath, I alone am eternal. One bough of clear promise Across the moon
Frederic Manning
Sometimes the Lord allows us to go through tough times so we learn to rely upon Him.
Shirley Corder
The fact is that nothing is more difficult to believe than the truth; conversely, nothing seduces like the power of lies, the greater the better. It's only natural, and you will have to find the right balance. Having said that, let me add that this particular old woman hasn't been collecting only years; she has also collected stories, and none sadder or more terrible than the one she's about to tell you. You have been at the heart of this story without knowing it until today ...
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."[Letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867]
George Sand
America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.
Ayn Rand
Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
Ayn Rand
Noseless and Handless, the Lannister Boys.
George R.R. Martin
You are your mother's trueborn son of Lannister.""Am I?" the dwarf replied, sardonic. "Do tell my lord father. My mother died birthing me, and he's never been sure.""I don't even know who my mother was," Jon said. "Some woman, no doubt. Most of them are." He favored Jon with a rueful grin. "Remember this, boy. All dwarfs may be bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs."And with that he turned and sauntered back into the feast, whistling a tune. When he opened the door, the light from within threw his shadow clear across the yard, and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood tall as a king.
George R.R. Martin
He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
William Golding
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
W Somerset Maugham
How can you still count yourself a knight, when you have forsaken every vow you ever swore?" Jaime reached for the flagon to refill his cup. "So many vows...they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or the other.
George R.R. Martin