Quotes by Novelists - Page 61

Flirting is the sin of the virtuous and the virtue of thesinful.
Paul Bourget
Delight is délice, délit is a misdemeanour''Well, it's bloody close...''Well, they often are....
Alan Hollinghurst
Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness.
Richard Russo
Virtue, should there be anyone who still ignores the fact, always finds pitfalls on the extremely difficult path of perfection, but sin and vice are so favoured by fortune...
José Saramago
He [Muffat] experienced a sense of pleasure mingled with remorse, the sort of pleasure peculiar to those Catholics whom the fear of hell spurs on to commit sin.
Émile Zola
One gives way to the temptation, only to rise from it again, afterwards, with a great eagerness to reestablish one's dignity, as if it were a tombstone to place on the grave of one's shame, and a monument to hide and sign the memory of our weaknesses. Everybody's in the same case. Some folks haven't the courage to say certain things, that's all!THE STEP-DAUGHTER: All appear to have the courage to do them though.
Luigi Pirandello
The more grievous the sin, the greater the repentance, God was bidding His time.
Émile Zola
Ribs closing on his heart, Will battled internal sirens whose song he couldn’t yet decipher. During his childhood, ‘sin’ had been such an abstract word. It denoted getting your Sunday best dirty and torn, or lying to have your brother punished for things you’d done yourself. But now, on the cusp of adulthood, the word seemed to grow and change, to acquire terrifying shades of darkness. He was beginning to understand that there was more to it. That there were things the human body longed for that were infinitely worse than playing in mud and telling fibs.
Ingela Bohm
But that wasn't the chief thing that bothered me: I couldn't reconcile myself with that preoccupation with sin that, so far as I could tell, was never entirely absent from the monks' thoughts. I'd known a lot of fellows in the air corps. Of course they got drunk when they got a chance, and had a girl whenever they could and used foul language; we had one or two had hats: one fellow was arrested for passing rubber cheques and was sent to prison for six months; it wasn't altogether his fault; he'd never had any money before, and when he got more than he'd ever dreamt of having, it went to his head. I'd known had men in Paris and when I got back to Chicago I knew more, but for the most part their badness was due to heredity, which they couldn't help, or to their environment, which they didn't choose: I'm not sure that society wasn't more responsible for their crimes than they were. If I'd been God I couldn't have brought myself to condemn one of them, not even the worst, to eternal damnation. Father Esheim was broad-minded; he thought that hell was the deprivation of God's presence, but if that is such an intolerable punishment that it can justly be called hell, can one conceive that a good God can inflict it? After all, he created men, if he so created them that ti was possible for them to sin, it was because he willed it. If I trained a dog to fly at the throat of any stranger who came into by back yard, it wouldn't be fair to beat him when he did so.If an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did he create evil? The monks said, so that man by conquering the wickedness in him, by resisting temptation, by accepting pain and sorrow and misfortune as the trials sent by God to purify him, might at long last be made worthy to receive his grace. It seem to me like sending a fellow with a message to some place and just to make it harder for him you constructed a maze that he had to get through, then dug a moat that he had to swim and finally built a wall that he had to scale. I wasn't prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn't common sense. I didn't see why you shouldn't believe in a God who hadn't created the world, buyt had to make the best of the bad job he'd found, a being enormously better, wiser and greater than man, who strove with the evil he hadn't made and who might be hoped in the end to overcome it. But on the other hand I didn't see why you should.
W Somerset Maugham
May your criminal enjoyments vanish as a shadow! may your ill-gotten wealth leave you without a resource; and may you yourself remain alone and deserted, to learn the vanity of these things, which now divert you from better pursuits!
Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles
Let them enjoy their Eden while they can; though there's plenty of apples, I fear, on the tree yet, Mr Lawford.
Walter de la Mare
To Roland's relief, Jean de Joinville came to his aid. "Sire, this good knight wants only to preserve your life. Let us all ride together against the Egyptians.""If I ride against them alone, God will protect me," said Louis.A new figure pushed into the circle. He wore the white surcoat and red cross of a Templar over his mail. With a leap of his heart, Roland recognized Guido Bruchesi. Guido looked at him but did not acknowledge him. He went directly to the King.He spoke quietly but firmly. "Sire, what you have just said is presumption.""I do not see how that could be, brother Templar." But Louis took his foot out of the stirrup as Roland watched with growing hope. You can always catch Louis's attention with a religious argument, Roland thought, even on the battlefield."Sire," said Guido, "Satan tempted our Seigneur Jesus, telling Him that if He cast Himself down from the mountaintop, angels would lift him up." Guido cast a sidelong look at Amalric. "You, Sire, are being tempted to ride alone against the whole Egyptian army, expecting God's protection. You are demanding a miracle. That is presumption."Louis was silent for a moment. "Perhaps you are right." Roland let out a long breath.
Robert Shea
But in these modern times it may be decidedly asserted as a fact, that vice, in accomplishing the vast majority of its seductions, uses no disguise at all; appears impudently in its naked deformity; and, instead of horrifying all beholders, in accordance with the prediction of the classical satirist, absolutely attracts a much more numerous congregation of worshippers than has ever yet been brought together by the divinest beauties that virtue can display for the allurement of mankind.
Wilkie Collins
We are not ordered by God to judge each other. We are not even ordered by him to consider another person's sin. We are ordered by God to let Him consider it, to let Him be judge.
Philippa Gregory
Bertha divined what an enormous wrong had been wrought against the world in that the longing for pleasure is placed in woman just as in man; and that with women that longing is a sin, demanding expiation, if the yearning for pleasure is not at the same time a yearning for motherhood.
Arthur Schnitzler
But the world doesn't run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. - Alan Furst; Red Gold
Alan Furst
Idleness and solitude led to these dramatics: an ordinary turd indulging himself as the chief of sinners.
Charles Portis
Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.
William Kennedy
His sins seemed to be so few that he was alarmed and groped anxiously for more, knowing he could not be without guilt.
Morley Callaghan
The last confession he heard was from a young hysterical girl who seemed to him to be making up a chain of small sins so that she could imagine herself full of remorse.
Morley Callaghan
Sin became a luxury, a flower set in her hair, a diamond fastened on her brow.
Émile Zola
Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
Sinclair Lewis
Good God, Keith.""Yes, I've talked to Him too and I'm still waiting on his Guidance...
John Grisham
There is no sinner like a young saint.
Aphra Behn
The persons whom you cannot care for in a novel, because they are so bad, are the very same that you so dearly love in your life, because they are so good.
Anthony Trollope
There's more to good or bad than what's written in the Rulebook.
Jasper Fforde
And no one rose to ask the question: Good?-by what standard?John Galt
Ayn Rand
Sometimes what we think is good for others... might be destructive for them... you never know
shivangi lavaniya
...the literary manifestation of the mind-body dichotomy that dominates today's culture: the split between the "serious" and the "entertaining" - the belief that if a literary work is "serious," it must bore people to death; and if it is "entertaining," it must not communicate anything of importance. (Which means that "the good" has to be painful, and that pleasure has to be mindlessly low-grade.)
Ayn Rand
Dont switch the blame to her, that's the oldest trick of all cowards
Ayn Rand
You look at love, and especially woman, as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
A woman's weapon is her tongue.
Anthony Trollope
If every woman had a direwolf, men would be much sweeter.
George R.R. Martin
Yes, this is the only good thing in life: love! To hold a woman you love in your arms! That is the ultimate in human happiness.
Guy de Maupassant
Such indeed was her image, that neither could Shakespeare describe, nor Hogarth paint, nor Clive act, a fury in higher perfection.
Henry Fielding
I wouldn't wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.
Lawrence Hill
We are all very much alike in France in this respect; we still remain knights, knights of love and fortune, since God has been abolished whose bodyguard we really were. But nobody can ever get woman out of our hearts; there she is, and there she will remain, and we love her, and shall continue to love her, and go on committing all kinds of follies on her account as long as there is a France on the map of Europe; and even if France were to be wiped off the map, there would always be Frenchmen left.
Guy de Maupassant
That just goes to show, remarked Pearlie, that you must never judge a woman in a kimono or a bathing suit.
Edna Ferber
A man can own a woman, and a man can own a knife, but no man can own both,
George R.R. Martin
She was no longer the fair-haired, colourless girl whom I had seen at the church fifteen years before, but a stout, over-dressed lady, one of those ladies with no age, no character, no elegance, no wit, nor any of the attributes that constitute a woman. She was merely a mother, a fat, commonplace mother, the breeder, the human brood-mare, the procreating machine made of flesh, with no interests but her children and her cookery-book.
Guy de Maupassant
But this is till the same girl who once lived in the steppes, wild and indomitable. Even when she ceased to play in the falling snow, the snow continued to fall within her soul. She never sough lovers among the wealthy men and the crown princes who prostrated themselves before her; her heart, like her voice, remained faultless. The reputation, temperament and talent of the woman partook of exactly the same crystalline transparency and icy clarity. ("The Glass Of Blood")
Jean Lorrain
What is a woman's greatest virtue?Patience.
India Edghill
A strange girl, all phosphorous and cantharides, burning with every desire! And burning with every vice!
Jean Lorrain
A shy smile, strong arms, clever fingers, and two sure swords. What more could any woman want?
George R.R. Martin
Her vice takes hold of her again, but she still refrains until some moment when, gnawed by some hideous caprice, she comes aground like a mournful wreck ruined by lust, in the midst of her own banal, perfidious pollution.
Jean Lorrain
But that woman is an encyclopedia!Of all vices, ancient and modern, and terribly interesting to leaf through!
Jean Lorrain
It was woman that taught me cruelty, and on woman therefore I have exercised it.
Walter Scott
Is there any creature on earth as unfortunate as an ugly woman? (wonders Lady Catelyn Stark)
George R.R. Martin
Thou hast had thty day, old dame, but thy sun has long been set. Thou art now the very emblem of an old warhorse turned out on the barren heath; thou hast had thy paces in thy time, but now a broken amble is the best of them.
Walter Scott
Even the simple act of tuning the radio to a music program can lift our spirits and show the world "I'm not going to give up.
Shirley Corder
There is nothing healthier for a man than to walk on his own two legs
José Saramago
The abscess is a distant memory. The pain is gone. This dinner with her hosts and her health-care team, this week of seeing another country and another culture, this time of being in demand, this moment is reality. I am a lucky girl, (Judy) thinks.
Shireen Jeejeebhoy
Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.
Thomas Keneally
There's no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven't got a job. All other things depend on work today.
Nevil Shute
When you got a condition, it's bad to forget your medicine.
Frank Miller
It was a cruel fate, Yet not so cruel as Mago's will be. I promise you that, by the old gods and the new, by the lamb god and the horse god and every god that lives. I swear by the Mother of Mountains and the Womb of the World. Before I am done with them, Mago and Ko Jhaqo will plead for the mercy they showed Eroeh.
George R.R. Martin
We could have touched the stars. Instead, you brought them to us. We didn't have to seek the heavens when we had you here with us now.
Jim Krueger
Lem glowered. "Your lion friends ride into some village, take all the food and every coin they find, and call it foraging. the wolves as well, so why not us? no one robbed you, dog. You just been good and foraged.
George R.R. Martin
Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.
Ayi Kwei Armah
I believe in justice, as long as I'm holding a knife at the throat of the judge.
Matthew Woodring Stover