Quotes by Novelists - Page 78

Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving
Suicide only really frightens those who are never tempted by it and never will be, for its darkness only welcomes those who are predestined to it.
Georges Bernanos
Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.
Joseph Conrad
Self-confidence depends on environment: one does not speak in the same tone in the drawing room than in the kitchen.
Gustave Flaubert
If you think you are powerless, then you are
Monica Ali
You are quite wrong about him," Felix had said. "He has not been atan English school, or English university, and therefore is not like other young men that you know; but he is, I think, well educated and clever. As for conceit, what man will do any good who is notconceited? Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinionof himself.""All the same, my dear fellow, I do not like Lucius Mason.
Anthony Trollope
The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.
Louis Kronenberger
Philip looked at his own work. How could you tell whether there was anything in it or whether you were wasting your time? It was clear that the will to achieve could not help you and confidence in yourself meantnothing.
W Somerset Maugham
He was grand in his convictions. He would stride forward to meet his own destruction.
Sōseki Natsume
He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.
John Fowles
Nothing builds confidence like live ammo.
Tim Dorsey
The only power that exists is inside ourselves.
Anne Rice
Alas! we must suffer ourselves before we can feel for others.
Émile Gaboriau
Excessive suffering brings with it a kind of dull insensibility and stupor....
Émile Gaboriau
Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.
Thorton Wilder
At any rate, they were strange fellows, these bohemians. They lounged around doing nothing and told you they were working; they were frightfully miserable and yet would tell you that they were perfectly happy. They had more troubles than others but seemed to bear them better, as if they fed on suffering.
Dezső Kosztolányi
People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.
Edward St. Aubyn
Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas
Langston Hughes
Help me to get my eyes off my suffering and onto you, God.
Shirley Corder
I hear the birds singing. Listen. I hear them in their cage. The others-all our kind who know of her-they think of her as heartless, but she wasn't heartless. She was only aware of things which I didn't learn till so many decades had passed. She knew secrets that only suffering can teach...
Anne Rice
Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.
Pico Iyer
There's nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you've suffered.
Vasily Grossman
If ever sorrow and suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie’s face, then, and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance resemblance, the living reflections of one another.
Wilkie Collins
If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight—they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.
Cesare Pavese
No man can bear a child's cross.
François Mauriac
There is silly are people. You must suffer, or cause others to suffer, before you will have respect of one kind or the other from them...I will not stand to be looked at by anybody, especially when the looking is done with wrong thinking.
Richard Llewellyn
But while they continued staring into one another’s face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.
Thornton Wilder
The trouble with this dog is that it has grown too close to human beings, it will suffer as they do.
José Saramago
... he was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness."Damn it," he sighed. "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!
Gabriel García Márquez
The cadence of suffering has begun.
Cesare Pavese
It was pleasant to think that men still sang, even in the midst of butchery and famine.
George R.R. Martin
Ever since the morning, Pierre had beheld many frightful sufferings in that woeful white train. But none had so distressed his soul as did that wretched female skeleton, liquefying in the midst of its lace and its millions.
Émile Zola
The faces stood out, separate, lonely, no two alike. Behind each, there were the years of a life lived or half over, effort, hope and an attempt, honest or dishonest, but an attempt. It had left on all a single mark in common: on lips smiling with malice, on lips loose with renunciation, on lips tight with uncertain dignity—on all—the mark of suffering.
Ayn Rand
Why they were loaded with bags of beans and peas and anything else they happened to pick up when they were still some distance away from the street where the first blind man and his wife lived, for that is where they are going, is a question that could only occur to someone who has never in his life suffered shortages.
José Saramago
YOUNG WOMAN: Time is altered, the years to came are alteredYou know where you will find meI, fear, I, deathI, the memory beyond reachI, the recollection of the tenderness of your handsI, the sadness of our broken lifeI will defeat "it's not my concern" with my anguish
Griselda Gambaro
In fact, she [Pamela Flitton] seemed to prefer 'older men' on the whole, possibly because of their potentiality for deeper suffering. Young men might superficially transcend their seniors in this respect, but they probably showed less endurance in sustaining that state, while, once pinioned, the middle-aged could be made to writhe almost indefinitely.
Anthony Powell
I did not know what she suffered from, but I knew that her malady must have been horrible; I knew that from the way she used to embrace me.
Octave Mirbeau
Language is accurate: you run for your life. If you are dying, leave. If you are suffering, move. There is no other law, only movement.
Amélie Nothomb
But there is no value to suffering!
Anne Rice
This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away. When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and then he would remain...
Joseph Conrad
Experience makes good people better." She was staring at the lake. "How does it do that?" "Through their suffering." "I had enough of that," he said in disgust. "We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness All it taught me was to stay away from it. I am sick of all I have suffered." She shrank away a little.
Bernard Malamud
I understood that I was suffering because I couldn't make anyone else around me feel better.
Muriel Barbery
Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.
William Dean Howells
Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
Honoré de Balzac
At last she sighed."But the most wretched thing — is it not? — is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.
Gustave Flaubert
It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn't destroy us, if it doesn't burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things.
Anne Rice
Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.
Léon Bloy
God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.
William Nicholson
People like him, who buried their past so determinedly, should not help it from the grave so easily.
Steve Berry
Stay More' is synonymous with 'Status Quo' in fact, there are people who believe, or who like to believe, that the name of the town was intended as an entreaty, beseeching the past to remain present.
Donald Harington
Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.
George R.R. Martin
Not even God can change the past.
Nadeem Aslam
To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.
Amitav Ghosh
That K was hesitant in love does not mean that his love was in any sense lukewarm. He was unable to move, despite the violence of his emotion. And since the impact of his new emotion was not so great as to allow him to forget himself, he was forced to look back and remind himself of what his past had meant. And in doing so he could not but continue along the path that he had so far followed.
Sōseki Natsume
We make our own symbols, after the event has passed and begun to spoil.
Françoise Sagan
There’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free off because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.
Kamila Shamsie
When this, our rose, is faded,And these, our days, are done,In lands profoundly shadedFrom tempest and from sun:Ah, once more come together,Shall we forgive the past,And safe from worldly weatherPossess our souls at last?
Ernest Dowson
A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless.
John Fowles
Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed between the pages of memory, savoured for a moment or two on quiet Sunday afternoons.
Indu Muralidharan
Only the past is real.
Frank Lentricchia