Quotes by Novelists - Page 67

A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards...in order to appeal to the irrationality, dishonesty or stupidity of others.
Ayn Rand
Craigengelt, you are either an honest fellow in right good earnest, and I scarce know how to believe that; or you are cleverer than I took you for, and I scarce know how to believe that either.
Walter Scott
Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest." William Gaddis, The Recognitions.
William Gaddis
Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of his career a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr. Honesty lives in at the end of his career?
Wilkie Collins
The truth is everything in the end. It is the greatest power in the world to make all people equal. If everyone knows what the truth is, no one can use lies to separate those people and turn them against one another.
Mel Odom
If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.
Tim O'Brien
I’d rather have a cup of coffee and a cigarette than live in all that honesty.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The main trouble with being an honest man was that it lost you all your illusions.
James Jones
You are an honest and honorable man, Lord Eddard. Ofttimes I forget that. I have met so few of them in my life.” He glanced around the cell. “When I see what honesty and honor have won you, I understand why.
George R.R. Martin
No matter how full one's head might be with the image of greatness, one was useless, I found out, unless one was a worthy man first.
Sōseki Natsume
Ten years from now, no one is going to care how quickly the books came out. The only thing that will matter, the only thing anyone will remember, is how good they were. That's my main concern, and always will be.
George R.R. Martin
It takes two to make a very great career: the man who is great, and the man--almost rarer--who is great enough to see greatness and say so.
Ayn Rand
Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire...They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear.
Ayn Rand
Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?
William Makepeace Thackeray
People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear
Ayn Rand
Some boys... Are perfect shits. & other boys are very, very beautiful.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Darker and darker, he said; farther and farther yet. Death takes the good, the beautiful, and the young - and spares me. The Pestilence that wastes, the Arrow that strikes, the Sea that drowns, the Grave the closes over Love and Hope, are steps of my journey, and take me nearer and nearer to the End.
Wilkie Collins
The pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol. Stretching into the darkness beyond, the single houses, double houses, and villas were lined up in cramped, neat rows which ran toward the tip of the peninsula. p94
Sue Monk Kidd
For till the thunder and trumpet be,Soul may divide from body, but not weOne from another
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Everything beautiful hurts.
Daryl Gregory
And you are with us and one of us, and we are the people of the moon and the stars.
Anne Rice
The beautiful have so much easier a time of it than the ugly, don't you think? They get smiled at the whole time. Strangers offer them things. People notice the beautiful; the beautiful are constantly acknowledged.
Jackie Kay
I’ve always been a sucker for the beautiful and the batshit.
Daryl Gregory
Yet even so, Jon Snow was not sorry he had come. There were wonders here as well. He had seen sunlight flashing on icy thin waterfalls as they plunged over the lips of sheer stone cliffs, and a mountain meadow full of autumn wildflowers, blue coldsnaps and bright scarlet frostfires and stands of piper's grass in russet and gold. He had peered down ravines so deep and black they seemed certain to end in some hell, and he had ridden his garron over a wind-eaten bridge of natural stone with nothing but sky to either side. Eagles nested in the heights and came down to hunt the valleys, circling effortlessly on great blue-grey wings that seemed almost part of the sky.
George R.R. Martin
Well, that was the end of me, the real end. Two pound ten every Tuesday and a room of the Gray's Inn Road. Saved, rescued and with my place to hide in - what more did I want? I crept in and hid. The lid of the coffin shut down with a bang. Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone. No more pawings, no more pryings - leave me alone.
Jean Rhys
You’re so beautiful, Dominique. Its such a lovely accident on God’s part that there’s one person who matches inside and out.
Ayn Rand
You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you.
Niall Williams
her smile was as beautiful as the only star in a dark night...
shivangi lavaniya
our earth is the most beautiful mother :)
shivangi lavaniya
Tell Khan Drogo that he has given me the wind.
George R.R. Martin
[I]t is that we are too apt to despise what appears to be neither good nor beautiful, and thus we lose what is helpful and salutary.
George Sand
I wrenched open the windows. I stood while the cold air poured around my face like dark water, as if I was a rock and it was chiselling me into a new shape.
Sue Woolfe
I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A strange thing, the human heart in general, and woman's heart in particular.
Mikhail Lermontov
I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.
Anne Rice
You are an unusual, brilliant child who has not seen enough of life to grasp the full measure of human stupidity.
Ayn Rand
Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state —indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer.
Ayn Rand
If there’s any greater exhibit of the malleability of human nature than the sight of someone standing, absently waiting for the light to change at a deserted intersection, I don’t know what it is.
Christopher Sorrentino
To be human, that's what most of us long for. It is the human which has become myth to us.
Anne Rice
Peril-ridden and fragile, the imperfect human body, what a shameful thing it was!
Kenzaburō Ōe
Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.
Richard Adams
Such is our need to shower blame on some distant entity when it is we who lack the courage to face up to what is there before us.
José Saramago
To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
Alphonse de Lamartine
Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper.
John Fowles
To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king’s whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn’t, and I am dead.
Hilary Mantel
I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can't be usual to go to your favorite memory only to find someone already there, admiring the view ahead of you.
Jasper Fforde
In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kidding on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
Gabriel García Márquez
Very soon she'll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter. The way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh back at them. Yes, they've got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, it's a long, long line. She's one of them. I too can wait—for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie ...
Jean Rhys
If we were scars, our memories would be the stitches holding us together. You couldn't cut them apart, and if you did, it would tear you in two.""But my memories hurt," she said. "I want to forget. There's so much I just want to forget.""How are you going to do that ? Everything that's happened to you is still happening today. Once something has begun, it doesn't end. There, in your head, it never ends.
Kai Meyer
It is very strange to think back like this, although come to think of it, there is no fence or hedge round Time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.
Richard Llewellyn
He'd read once that in everyone's life there was somebody who touched a spot so deep, so precious, that the mind always retreated, in time of need, to that cherished place, seeking comfort within memories that never seemed to disappoint.
Steve Berry
Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.
Rémy de Gourmont
Sometimes memories follow you wherever you go-you don't need to take them with you.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
She leaned out of the window slow and sleepy, and the light came through her nightdress like sand through a sieve.
Laurie Lee
O for those days when these tired metaphors were teenagers too, when it was still possible to recite ‘Daffodils’ and feel thrilled as you gazed at the golden laburnum in bloom. Recognising clichés is a sign of aging. Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed within the pages of memory, savoured for a moment ortwo on quiet Sunday afternoons.
Indu Muralidharan
I don't remember much, which is a kind of mercy,I suppose. I see it in patterns.Sometimes it's like a scribble on a wall- no matter how many times you paint over it, a bit of it always comes through, but not enough to put together the whole.I try not to think about it too much.
Amitav Ghosh
All my memories are poisoned.
George R.R. Martin
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Why don’t we keep track of the happy moments, so that afterward we will believe them? Is he the same man Was he really sincere?
Naguib Mahfouz