Quotes by Novelists - Page 69

Hate and love are reciprocal passions.
Gabriel García Márquez
What we love we may also despise.
Françoise Sagan
Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
John Fowles
Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.
Honoré de Balzac
I was modest--they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil--nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy--other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them--but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world--none understood me: and I learned to hate.
Mikhail Lermontov
People hate as they love, unreasonably.
William Makepeace Thackeray
To truly hate is an art one learns with time.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.
Robert Graves
Mother's intentions were always sound, never muddy; I don't imagine that she troubled herself to feel very guilty. But the Rev. Mr. Merrill was a man who took to wallowing in guilt; his remorse, after all, was all he had to cling to-especially after his scant courage left him, and he was forced to acknowledge that he would never be brave enough to abandon his miserable wife and children for my mother. He would continue to torture himself, of course, with the insistent and self-destructive notion that he loved my mother. I suppose that his "love" of my mother was as intellectually detached from feeling and action as his "belief" was also subject to his immense capacity for remote and unrealistic interpretation. My mother was a healthier animal; when he said he wouldn't leave his family for her, she simply put him out of her mind and went on singing.But as incapable as he was of a heartfelt response to a real situation, the Rev. Mr. Merrill was tirelessly capable of thinking; he pondered and brooded and surmised and second-guessed my mother to death.
John Irving
Vulnerability is the curse of the thinking classes.
John D. MacDonald
Don’t you know that most people take most things because that’s what’s given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?
Ayn Rand
As for the fear, you'll have to put up with that like the rest of us.
William Golding
I've had enough of these streets that sweat a cold, yellow slime, of hostile people, of crying myself to sleep every night. I've had enough of thinking, enough of remembering.
Jean Rhys
Have you ever noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get?
Sue Monk Kidd
Your addiction to thinking will come back to haunt you.
Sōseki Natsume
Thinking is like a fountain. Once it gets going at a certain pressure, well, it almost impossible to turn it off. And, my hat! what odd things come up with the water!("Out Of The Deep")
Walter de la Mare
Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere.
Joseph Conrad
At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking!
Ayn Rand
The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
While a creator does and must worship Man (which means his own highest potentiality; which is his natural self-reverence), he must not make the mistake of thinking that this means the necessity to worship Mankind (as a collective). These are two entirely different conceptions, with entirely - (immensely and diametrically opposed) - different consequences.
Ayn Rand
When a man, however passively, becomes an obstacle to the fulfillment of a woman's desires, he becomes an odious thing in her eyes, - or will, given time enough.
Theodore Dreiser
We are faithful as long as we love, but youdemand faithfulness of a woman without love, and the giving ofherself without enjoyment. Who is cruel there--woman or man?
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.
Gabriel García Márquez
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
Honoré de Balzac
In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.
Walker Percy
But I am a just man, even to my enemy—and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them.
Wilkie Collins
To be free, a man must be free from his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.
Ayn Rand
Glorious is the Voice of Man, and sweet is the music of the harp.
Richard Llewellyn
Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary. He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place.
Rémy de Gourmont
Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t.
Ayn Rand
I thought of what my mom had said. "You talk like a man." It was easier to talk like a man than to be one.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality—you who have never known any—but to discover it.
Ayn Rand
Yes, I am crying although I am a man. But has not a man eyes! Has not a man hands, limbs,senses, thoughts, passions? Is he not fed with the wine food, hurt by the same weapons, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a woman? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? And if you poison us, do we not die? Why shouldn't a man complain, a soldier weep? Because it is unmanly? Why is it unmanly?
August Strindberg
Kill the boy and let the man be born.
George R.R. Martin
We are one. Man, horse, lance, we are one beast of blood and wood and iron.
George R.R. Martin
Wasn’t it correct in America to call a man ‘handsome’ rather than ‘beautiful’?
Edmund White
It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Life is short, nature is hostile, and man is ridiculous; but oddly enough most misfortunes have their compensations, and with a certain humour and a good deal of horse-sense one can make a fairly good job of what is after all a matter of very small consequence.
W Somerset Maugham
And do stop trying to determine if I am a man or a woman. The fact is I'm a good part both and therefore neither one. I was just explaining to your Aunt Queen. I was born endowed with the finest traits of both sexes and I drift this way and that as I choose.
Anne Rice
Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.
Benjamin Disraeli
You are the Perfect Young Man: honest, clean, virile.
Edmund White
Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other prupose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment.
W Somerset Maugham
Never test another man by your own weakness.
Joseph Conrad
I was like you once, long time ago. I believed in the dignity of man. Decency. Humanity. But I was lucky. I found out the truth early, boy.And what is the truth, Stark? It's all very simple. There's no such thing as the dignity of man. Man is a base, pathetic and vulgar animal.
Charles G. Finney
Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' in as unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he has acted through most of history.
Ayn Rand
Will you, then, never grow weary of being unjust?
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Feelings are like chemicals, the more you analyze them the worse they smell.
Charles Kingsley
One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.
Gustave Flaubert
Please don’t tell me you know just how I feel--you don't.
Shirley Corder
If passion was a substance I would say it is dark brown, and then blood red. It's like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It's warm and it stinks like shit and it's unaccountably and endlessly good. It's thick and it goes on for miles and it isn't so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. That's all you know.
Eileen Myles
You feel as if everybody has been given an instruction manual on how to be likable, but you didn’t get it. And they are all sold out now. And if you are what you eat, then you must have surely spent the last few years of your life eating dog food and cat shit. Because when you look in the mirror, it is all that you see.
Heather O'Neill
You feel as if everybody has been given an instruction manual on how to be likable, but you didn't get it. And they all sold out now. And if you are what you eat, then you must have surely spent the last few years of your life eating dog food and cat shit. Because when you look in the mirror, it is all that you see.
Heather O'Neill
For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.
Hilary Mantel
obsession either boosts up feeling or just blow iy off...
shivangi lavaniya
you brought other people close. look at me, i am still the same i was before ; having just two best friends in my case.and you are not happy with me. you hold grudges. So then free yourself. Remove this tag of best friend and feel free.
shivangi lavaniya
Hence the migratory bird was about to leave then the other bird just querked and weeped
shivangi lavaniya
I wanted to tell him not to cry anymore, tell him that what those boys did to that bird didn’t matter. But I knew it did matter. It mattered to Dante. And, anyway, it didn’t do any good to tell him not to cry because he needed to cry. That’s the way he was.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Frederick expected that he would have felt spasms of joy; but the passions grow pale when we find ourselves in an altered situation; and, as he no longer saw Madame Arnoux in the environment wherein he had known her, she seemed to him to have lost some of her fascination; to have degenerated in some way that he could not comprehend—in fact, not to be the same. He was astonished at the serenity of his own heart./... sentimentele slăbesc cînd le schimbi locul...
Gustave Flaubert
People think they know what you're feeling. What you must be feeling. And because it's easier not to expose yourself, what you're truly feeling, you don't disabuse them. You go through the motions for them.
Sue Miller