Quotes by Novelists - Page 76

The Lord chose to give me back my life, not because I deserved it, but because he had work for me to do.
Shirley Corder
There is a fine line between paranoia and sensibly caring for our already overburdened bodies.
Shirley Corder
Nu exista pe lume leac care sa tamaduiasca ceea ce nu tamaduieste fericirea/ There is no cure in this world which heals what happiness does not heal.
Gabriel García Márquez
What issues sidetrack you from your mission to get well?
Shirley Corder
When you feel that unpleasant darkness invading your mind, read this book and these stories will help you return to the light and warmth of life.
Indu Muralidharan
Trying to find answers to why and how my life got into such a dismal mess, I sought answers in the scriptures, in religion and philosophy, but it only confused me further. Stories, on the other hand, helped me cope, heal and recover.
Indu Muralidharan
Scars heal when you learn to FLY.F(irst) L(ove) Y(ourself).
Shilpa Menon
Healing is not a process, it is a choice. Nothing can heal your scars until you decide to.
Shilpa Menon
If you want to heal Heal othersAnd smile or weepAt this happy reversal of fate
Muriel Barbery
Most scars are destined long before they are experienced. Healing is however, a choice.
Shilpa Menon
Hope is the first step to healing
Shilpa Menon
Most scars are destined long before they are experienced. Healing is however, a choice,
Shilpa Menon
The power to heal the scars begins with hope.
Shilpa Menon
Healing begins with owing your scars & disowning that which caused them
Shilpa Menon
With time, scars turn into wisdom.
Shilpa Menon
All the world knew that a maester forged his silver link when he learned the art of healing—but the world preferred to forget that men who knew how to heal also knew how to kill.
George R.R. Martin
All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I'd tried to complete my life with someone else--first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn't want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.
Sue Monk Kidd
I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise another how to act unless one knows that other as well as one knows himself? Heaven knows. I know little enough of myself: I know nothing of others. We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbours. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself.
W Somerset Maugham
At last the gardener arrived, mumbling something about rascals and country bumpkins, and took me out into the park, giving me a lengthy lecture as he did so. I was instructed to be sober and industrious, and not to wander about aimlessly or waste my time in unproductive activities: if I heeded this counsel, he said, I might in time achieve something. He gave me much other useful and well-phrased advice too, but I have since forgotten almost all of it.
Joseph von Eichendorff
Never trust anyone Daniel, especially the people you admire
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living isn't complicated enough
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If you want my advice, Peter,” he said at last, “you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?
Ayn Rand
Your advice seems a little ironical.""Oh, you may either follow it or reverse it—that is its chief beauty. It is equally good taken either way.
Thomas Henry Lister
Rain clouds and stormy moods take time to blow away, but sooner or later the sun always comes out.
Shirley Parenteau
We are all weak most of the time,' she said finally. 'Look at the baby. Born to his mother, he learns how to eat from her, how to walk, talk, hunt, run. He does not invent new ways. He just continues with the old. This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.' She smiled at him. 'But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.
Yaa Gyasi
I don't advise. You mutn't give any weight to what I say, except in so far as your own judgment approves it.
George Gissing
What did being connected to the world get you? It got you sadder. Look, the world is not sane. If you stay connected to an insane world, well, you just go crazy. This is not a complicated theory. It's just simple logic.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Dear Aspiring Writer, you are not ready. Stop. Put that finished story away and start another one. In a month, go back and look at the first story. RE-EDIT it. Then send it to a person you respect in the field who will be hard on you. Pray for many many many red marks. Fix them. Then put it away for two weeks. Work on something else. Finally, edit one last time. Now you are ready to sub your first work.Criticism is hard to take at first. Trust me, I've been there. But learn to think of crit marks as a knife. Each one is designed to cut away the bad and leave a scar. Scars prove you've lived, learned and walked away a winner. Any writer who tells you they don't need edits is lying. I don't care if they have 100 books out. Edits make you grow and if you aren't growing as a writer, you are dead.
Inez Kelley
The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother's milk. Darkness will make you strong.
George R.R. Martin
Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.
John Fowles
If man could apply half the ingenuity he’s exhibited in the creation of weapons to more sensible ends, there’s no limit to what he might yet accomplish
Mark Frost
But truly it was not the money that mattered. It was the distant glitter of everything that was possible in the world, the things she had always wanted for herself and could not name and called happiness because there was no other word.
Tim O'Brien
The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver--over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher thanthe wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a somber gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur.All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing thatcouldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there?
Joseph Conrad
PDR: Persons of Dubious Reality; refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real, from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Characters from cautionary tales are particularly mindless; they do what they do because it's what they've always done.And it's our job to stop them.
Jasper Fforde
There are no secrets, there is no mystery. We make that all up. In fact, it's all right there in front of us. You have to have enough food to get through winter and spring. That's what it all comes down to. You have to live in a way that will gather enough food each fall to get through winter.
Kim Stanley Robinson
What does myself now say to me?"Open the door of Mystery.
May Sarton
Do you think the Goblin King really did it?" asked Cordelia hesitantly. All the sheep knew she was talking about George's death. Mopple quickly pulled up a tuft of grass."Or Satan?" added Lane."Nonsense," Rameses snorted nervously. "Satan would never do a thing like that."several of the sheep bleated in agreement. None of them thought Satan capable of such an act. Satan was an elderly donkey who sometimes grazed in the meadow next to theirs, and uttered blood-curdling cries. his voice was truly dreadful, but otherwise he'd always struck them as harmless.
Leonie Swann
In all emotional conflicts, the thing you find the most difficult to do, is the thing that you should do."--Meyer's Law
John D. MacDonald
You’re a mystery the way a sacrament is a mystery.
Anne Rice
Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act, he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts whom he does not know, who are mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveller dying of thirst needs the Gospel’s draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind
Léon Bloy
Nothing doing. I've no doubt you think I should look noble as a sacrifice. But I've never wanted to look noble, and I won't be made to. -- Neville Fletcher
Georgette Heyer
Don't worry. Chivalry has practically no appeal for me whatsoever. -- Neville Fletcher
Georgette Heyer
I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young.
Wilkie Collins
You should not have to burn your hand every day to feel the mystery of fire.
Steve Abbott
I have abstained from expressing any opinion, so far," says Mr. Superintendent, with his military voice still in good working order. "I have now only one remark to offer, on leaving this case in your hands. There IS such a thing, Sergeant, as making a mountain out of a mole-hill. Good-morning.""There is also such a thing as making nothing out of a mole-hill, in consequence of your head being too high to see it." Having returned his brother-officer's compliment in those terms, Sergeant Cuff wheeled about, and walked away to the window by himself.
Wilkie Collins
Sunday lay so heavily in the air as to become almost nauseating. Maigret used to claim openly, half seriously, half in fun, that he had always had the knack of sensing a Sunday from his bed, without even having to open his eyes.
Georges Simenon
Did you fall asleep?""No. I couldn't sleep that night.""You were restless?""I was thinking of you."The answer almost unmanned me. Something in the tone, even more than in the words, went straight to my heart. It was only after pausing a little first that I was able to go on.
Wilkie Collins
Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever.
John Fowles
A wise man once told me that mystery is the most essential ingredient of life, for the following reason: mystery creates wonder, which leads to curiosity, which in turn provides the ground for our desire to understand who and what we truly are.
Mark Frost
Mysteries precede humankind, envelop us and draw us forward into exploration and wonder. Secrets are the work of humankind, a covert and often insidious way to gather, withhold or impose power. Do not confuse the pursuit of one with the manipulation of the other.
Mark Frost
I hadn't even solved the mystery of my own body.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A secret's only a secret as long as you keep it. Once you tell someone it loses all its power -- for good or ill -- like that, it's just another piece of information. But a real mystery can't be solved, not completely. It's always just out of reach, like a light around the corner; you might catch a glimpse of what it reveals, feel its warmth, but you can't know the heart of it, not really. That's what gives it value: It can't be cracked, it's bigger than you and me, bigger than everything we know.
Mark Frost
It’s all very well to have your eight suspects parading in their endless ring-around-the-rosebush outside the library. That’s fine. But give some sensible reason why they were there. If you must shower the room with bus tickets, provide a reason for that too. In other words, construct your story. Your present problem is not to explain the villainy of the guilty: it’s to explain the stupidity of the innocent.
John Dickson Carr
We have come from all the countries of the world and are going to Saintes-Maries de la Mer. Nomads of the enigma, we gather there each year after having carried our mystery through ordinary countryside and fluid towns. Since we become transformed by our wanderings we are despised by those who stand still and retain a memory of giant serpents and metallic green.
Raymond Queneau
We were on Barrow Street now."Who is the man with the scar?" I said.She shot me a glance, and her face hardened. "You saw him?""How could I miss? He was the real center of attention. Didn't you go to the opening at all?""No" She said. "And just because you saw him doesn't mean he was there.
Nicholas Christopher
How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses - with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or too distant, such as the beings who live on a star or the creatures which live in a drop of water... with ears that deceive us by converting vibrations of the air into tones that we can hear, for they are sprites which miraculously change movement into sound, a metamorphosis which gives birth to harmonies which turn the silent agitation of nature into song... with our sense of smell, which is poorer than any dog's... with our sense of taste, which is barely capable of detecting the age of a wine!Ah! If we had other senses which would work other miracles for us, how many more things would we not discover around us!
Guy de Maupassant
People are mysterious, even to themselves.
Frank Lentricchia
Alan Campbell opened one eye.From somewhere in remote distances, muffled beyond sight or sound, his soul crawled back painfully, through subterranean corridors, up into his body again. Toward the last it moved to a cacophony of hammers and lights. Then he was awake.The first eye was bad enough. But, when he opened his second eye, such as rush of anguish flowed through his brain that he hastily closed them again.
John Dickson Carr
I didn't know that once you've proven yourself useful to the wrong people, you'll never be free again.
Steve Hamilton
I needed a new mystery.
John Fowles