Quotes by Novelists - Page 65

New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people.
Anne Rice
How do you eat your roots?
Kamila Shamsie
I was born on a Thursday, hence the name. My brother was born on a Monday and they called him Anton--go figure. My mother was called Wednesday, but was born on a Sunday--I don't know why--and my father had no name at all--his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard after he went rogue. To all intents and purposes he didn't exist at all. It didn't matter. He was always Dad to me...
Jasper Fforde
In just a few weeks, Soldier 13 became aware of a mutation in the colors of his consciousness. As the theoretical classes were filling his brain with philosophical, historical, and political arguments to make his faith unbreakable, the sessions with the psychologists were draining his mind of the deadweight of experiences, memories, fears, and illusions forged of the course of a life of a past that he detached himself from as if they were skinning him. He was overwhelmed to see how his personal history was becoming a foggy haze and how even recent events, like Kotov's last recommendations before he returned to Spain, seemed to diffuse that he sometimes asked himself if he hadn't lived them in another remote and murky existence.During those months was when Ramon really began to stop being Ramon and only became him against when the man they were turning him into was suffocating and, to save him, the former Ramon Mercader had to come to the surface. Or whenever they ordered him to go out and get some sun. But he was never again the same Ramon Mercader del Rio.p. 208
Leonardo Padura
Larry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world's confusion, so wistful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful and so cagey, so mean and so generous, which is the people of the United States.
W Somerset Maugham
Sleep is where we touch what is better left unexamined. There, the whole of life is bundled up, dwindled. There the carefully hoarded and enjoyed personality, our only treasure and at the same time our only defense must die into the ultimate truth of things, the black lightning that splits and destroys all, the positive, unquestionable nothingness.
William Golding
Remember that when you say ‘I will have none of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange,’ you have denied America with that word.
Stephen Vincent Benét
A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it's this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want and a new name if it's cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It's the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else.
Russell Banks
run run run Hermione. You have in your hands a message and a token...run and run and run and run Hermione. You know running and running and running that the messenger will take (lampadephoros) your message in its fervour and you will sink down exhausted...run,run, Hermione. For the message-bearer next in line has turned against you...dead, dead or forgotten. Hecate at crossroads, a destruction...
H.D.
Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last. But the wilderness found him out early, and had taken vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core
Joseph Conrad
In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.
Muriel Barbery
If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you.
Kamila Shamsie
He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.
Gustave Flaubert
A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
John Berger
Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.
George R.R. Martin
The nature of the universe probably depends heavily on who is the actual protagonist. Lately I've been suspecting it's one of my cats.
Wil McCarthy
Anybody who thinks there's nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. If there is a God who created this world, he should scrap it and try again.
Athol Fugard
I guess I didn't have it so bad.Maybe everybody didn't love me,but i wasn't one of those kids that everyone hated,either.I was good in a fight.So people left me alone.i was almost invisible.i think i liked it that way.And then Dante came along.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The illusion of free will is so strong in my mind that I can't get away from it, but I believe it is only an illusion. But it is an illusion which is one of the strongest motives of my actions. Before I do anything I feel that I have a choice, and that influences what I do; but afterwards, when the thing is done, I believe it was inevitable from all eternity.''What do you deduce from that?''Why merely the futility of regret. It's no good crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.
W Somerset Maugham
These are the sports, the offthrows, of the universe instead of the species; these are the weird children of the lust of the spheres.
Charles G. Finney
The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.
Cyrano de Bergerac
I have this idea that the reason we have dreams is that we're thinking about things that we don't know we're thinking about-and those things, well, they sneak out of us in our dreams. Maybe we're like tires with too much air in them. The air has to leak out. That's what dreams are.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I guess I did miss Dante-even though I tried hard to not think about him. The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Men go and come, but earth abides.
George R. Stewart
The Bible is just a book. But, you choose whether to prove it's all true or nothing.
Shim Steward
Don't be afraid," Elisha answered, "We have more on our side than they have on theirs." (2 Kings 6:15 GNT)
Shirley Corder
You must realize...that the men of the Valley have built their houses and brought up their families without help from others, without a word from the Government. Their lives have been ordered from birth by the Bible. From it they took their instructions. They had no other guidance, and no other law. If it has produced hypocrites and pharisees, the fault is in the human race. We are not all angels. Our fathers upheld good conduct and rightful dealing by strictness, but it is in Man Adam to be slippery, and many are as slimy as the adder. The wonder is to me that the men of the Valley are as they are, and not barbarians at all.I was sorry for Meillyn Lewis, too. But that session of the deacons was helpful as a preventative. It was cruel, but it is more cruel to allow misconduct to flourish without check.
Richard Llewellyn
Well, he'd get help from the Bible. It was all inspired, every word, no matter what scoffers like Jim said. He'd take the first text he turned to and talk on that.He opened on: 'Now THEREFORE, Tatnai, governor beyond the river, Shethar-boznai, and your companions the Apharsachites, which ARE beyond the river, be ye far from thence,' an injunction spirited but not at present helpful.
Sinclair Lewis
The day I charge an unbeliever like you for the word of God will be the day I'm struck dead by lightning, and with good reason.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear.
Tim O'Brien
In the black chaos where the seas and the skies become confused let the projectors blow their white trumpets of silence("Roundness")
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
On days when it was too hot, they did not leave their room. The dazzling brilliance from outside plastered bars of light between the slats of the blinds. Not a sound in the village. Down below, on the sidewalk, no one. This spreading silence increased the tranquility of things. In the distance, the caulkers’ hammers tamped the hulls, and a heavy breeze brought the smell of tar.
Gustave Flaubert
I hear nothing. I hear nothing, but what does it mean that I hear nothing? I walk in the cemeteries of this city at night and I hear nothing. I walk among mortals and sometimes I hear nothing. I walk alone and I hear nothing, as if I myself had no inner voice.
Anne Rice
The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
...there are times when silence is a poem.
John Fowles
She was a woman of extended silences, I noticed, and she said very little as we walked the streets of La Boca, looking at its brightly colored houses. It was as if she understood that quiet observation was the key to knowing a place, perhaps even the key to life.
Thomas H. Cook
The silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it, and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure.
W Somerset Maugham
The silence sat down with them like an invisible creature with its finger to its lips.
Russell Hoban
For ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped there was so little public discussion of the bomb or of radioactivity that even the Chugoku Shinbun, the major newspaper of the city where the atomic bomb was dropped, did not have the movable type for 'atomic bomb' or 'radioactivity'. The silence continued so long because the U.S. Army Surgeons Investigation Team in the fall of 1945 had issued a mistaken statement: all people expected to die from the radiation effects of the atomic bomb had by then already died; accordingly, no further cases of physiological effects due to residual radiation would be acknowledged.
Kenzaburō Ōe
Sarah...loved the way the light lit the silence first thing in the morning.
Niamh Boyce
It would never have crossed her mind spontaneously that somebody might actually need silence. That silence helps you to go inward, that anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence: this, I think, is not something Colombe is capable of understanding, because her inner space is as chaotic and noisy as the street outside.
Muriel Barbery
In fact, the room was so quiet you might have heard a drop of paint splash.
Jasper Fforde
I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
One of the greatest skills any leader can master is becoming comfortable with silence.
David Grossman
Silence is a prince's friend.
George R.R. Martin
Silence: the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm - threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.
Richard Powers
He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere
Richard Powers
I keep thinkingThat poetry is something else:A form of love that exists only in silence,In a secret place between two people,Almost always between two strangers
José Emilio Pacheco
that we die, our very humanity slayed, whenever we choose to remain silent in the face of tyranny.
Okey Ndibe
The pale water which goes away along paths of silence.
Georges Rodenbach
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
David Markson
The effort of explaining, even of expressing himself, had become, with the years, more and more terrifying to him. Whether from laziness or from inability to find the right words, he had developed almost a passion for silence.
François Mauriac
The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.
Rémy de Gourmont
If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.
John Fowles
It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden.
Muriel Spark
Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Lawrence Durrell
Sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds.... my cheeks recalled the effects of its profound caress.
Muriel Barbery
I thank you for calling them off, young ser. I promise you, they would have found me indigestible.
George R.R. Martin
I did an about-face and veered into the sandwich shop. What I ordered is none of your business, but it was really good.
Sue Grafton