Quotes by Novelists - Page 63

To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.
Richard Russo
We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
William Golding
The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men.
Joseph Conrad
Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!
William Golding
Who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the "Critical-Subjective," where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp's civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premises apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphtha's "morally chaotic All.
Thomas Mann
And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience... The extreme violence of the totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.
Vasily Grossman
- You get more misanthropic every day.- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.
Richard Russo
It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
Russell Banks
An ugly smile. An ugly soul.
George R.R. Martin
I could wish to spy the nakedness of their hearts, and through the different disguises of customs, climates, and religion, find out what is good in them, to fashion my own by. It is for this reason that I have not seen the Palais Royal - nor the facade of the Louvre - nor have attempted to swell the catalogues we have of pictures, statues, and churches - I conceive every fair being as a temple, and would rather enter in, and see the original drawings and loose sketches hung up in it, than the Transfiguration of Raphael itself.
Laurence Sterne
What constitutes the character of a nation is the character of many individual human beings; every national character is in essence, simply human nature. All the worlds nations, therefore, have a great deal in common with one another. The foundation of any national character is human nature. The foundation of national character is simply a particular colouring taken on by human nature, a particular crystallisation of it.
Vasily Grossman
I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I am generous to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my suppressed rage, that I am punctual only only to hide how little I care about other peoples time.
Gabriel García Márquez
-Would you wish us to invest it for you?-No, I would like you to set up a trust for dumb animals.-What kind of dumb animals do you have in mind, Miss Donahue?-Oh, stray dogs. Rats. Birds.-We could still invest it for you. Then the animals would get the income without touching the capital.-No, I don't wish to invest it. I don't want them to get rich. They might become human.
Romain Gary
...you'll see, he said, they'll go back to dividing everything up among the priests, the gringos and the rich, and nothing for the poor, naturally, because they've always been so fucked up that the day that shit is worth money, poor people will be born without an asshole...
Gabriel García Márquez
Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.
Rémy de Gourmont
The true champions of a nation's freedom are those who reject the limitations of stereotypes and affirm the rich diversity of human nature to be found.
Vasily Grossman
I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretence invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.
Gabriel García Márquez
Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a human being which can never be fathomed but may perhaps be glimpsed for a fleeting instant, in those moments of unguardedness or surrender or inattention, that are like doors left ajar onto the mysterious depths of the spirit... they stood for a few seconds, each gazing into the other's eyes, each striving to reach the impenetrable secret of the other's heart, to probe each other's thoughts to the quick. They tried, in a mute and passionate questioning, to see the other's conscience in its essential truth: the intimate struggles of two beings who, living side by side, never really know one another, who suspect and sniff around and spy on one another, but cannot plumb the miry depths of one another's soul.
Guy de Maupassant
...He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him: "Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors; men are universally actuated by self-interest; gratitude is a lovely sense of expected benefits; promises are never forgotten by those to whom they are made, usually by those who make them.
W Somerset Maugham
... I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid in my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere. how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the reprobate.
W Somerset Maugham
Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands.
Gustave Flaubert
I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.So I renamed myself Ari.If I switched the letter, my name was Air.I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.
Niall Williams
Ah, what broken creatures we are, and how we endure.
Anne Rice
You do much worse things- you who can see to other planets."- Bertha, "The Father
August Strindberg
I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility.
Amitav Ghosh
Perhaps there is a beast...maybe it's only us.
William Golding
We are only human, and the Gods have fashioned us for love. This is our greatest glory and our greatest tragedy.
George R.R. Martin
An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect," Corelli asserted. "he claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying : "Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual. Once again, it's all the work of nature. Far from being the sylph to whom poets sing, nature is a cruel, voracious mother who needs to feed on the creatures she gives birth to in order to stay alive.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain – the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York. Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldn't have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do.
Hilary Mantel
It is only dogs that never bite their masters.
Thornton Wilder
The mind of man is capable of anything-because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage-who can tell?-but truth-truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder-the man know, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet the truth with his own true stuff-with his own inborn strength.
Joseph Conrad
Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.
Richard Russo
And this lesson about mortal peace of mind I never forgot. Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing in pans all over, pouring water of pillows, making clocks chime at all hours, mortal will accept almost any "natural explanation" offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on.
Anne Rice
Because," she said, "that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn't they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.
Anne Rice
On the whole, all people are good, or at least they're normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch.
Sōseki Natsume
Human nature is the same in all professions.
Laurence Sterne
They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.
Émile Zola
...tell them that we have some good in us, too. And the only thing worth living for is the good. That’s why we’ve got to make sure we pass it on.
Billie Letts
Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.
Sue Grafton
You ever get the feeling the world's filling up with bastards? I do. What I want to know is what happens when all the bastards run out of people to crap on? What happens when all that's left in the world is bastards? . . . The golden rule. Screw unto others before they screw unto you.
William Hoffman
Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.
Ayn Rand
The right thing was confusing, and difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal, like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later.
Thomas Mullen
There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.
José Saramago
Have you ever been going somewhere with a crowd and you're certain it's the wrong road and you tell them, but they won't listen, so you just have to plod along in what you know is the wrong direction till somebody more important gets the same idea?
James Hilton
Getting there, that's what's important even if you can't get back.
Thomas O'Malley
The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesn't matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark.
Barbara Hall
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.
W Somerset Maugham
Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the state to adjudicate fairly and employ diplomatic means wherever possible to avoid armed conflict.
Jasper Fforde
You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.
Guy de Maupassant
Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipw
Guy de Maupassant
Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governm
Guy de Maupassant
Funding for the Special Operations Network comes directly from the government. Most work is centralized, but all of the SpecOps divisions have local representatives to keep a watchful eye on any provincial problems. They are administered by local commanders, who liaise with the national offices for information exchange, guidance and policy decisions. Like any other big government department, it looks good on paper but is an utter shambles. Petty infighting and political agendas, arrogance and sheer bloody-mindedness almost guarantees that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing.
Jasper Fforde
The experience taught him [Salvador Allende] too late that a system cannot be changed from the government but from the power.
Gabriel García Márquez
They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy-just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it.
Wilbur Smith
The Government's going to pass a bill regarding schools. Well I never. Interfering gang they are, as if a parent doesn't know what's best for her own child. I don't know, I don't know! We won't be able to call our children our own just now.
James Hanley
A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.
Ayn Rand
The fact is, the primary way that Ottawa and Washington deal with Native people is to ignore us. They know that the court system favors the powerful and the wealthy and the influential, and that, if we buy into the notion of an impartial justice system, tribes and bands can be forced through a long, convoluted, and expensive process designed to wear us down and bankrupt our economies.Be good. Play by our rules. Don't cause a disturbance.
Thomas King
The man who is not permitted to own is owned.
George Santayana
Keep your head down, Edward. Those that see too much quickly find themselves seeing nothing at all.
Jasper Fforde