Quotes by Novelists - Page 8

I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.
Luigi Pirandello
It's funny but... you're sort of a moving target for fortune and you never know when it will befall you.
Thomas McGuane
What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities of having a patient but restless mind of sacrificing one's ease or vanity of uniting a love of detail to foresight and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.
Charles Victor Cherbuliez
Chance works for us when we are good captains.
George Meredith
We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound Tokens of love and hate black sorcery stones.
Stephen Vincent Benét
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate and she is fate.
Thomas Mann
You too must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today since like that of yesterday it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.
Luigi Pirandello
The most important thing in marriage is not happiness but stability.
Gabriel García Márquez
In spite of all of the training you get and the precautions you take to keep yourself alive it's largely a matter of luck that decides whether or not you get killed.
James Jones
We do not write as we want but as we can.
W Somerset Maugham
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
It is only fools who keep straining at high C all their lives.
Charles Dudley Warner
There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
May Sarton
As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.
J. A. Froude
What is destructive is impatience haste expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
George Santayana
My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.
Benjamin Disraeli
Progress far from consisting in change depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are content to repeat it.
George Santayana
Flight is the only true sensation that men have achieved in modern history.
James Dickey
What is difficulty? Only a word indicating the degree of strength requisite for accomplishing particular objects a mere notice of the necessity for exertion ... a mere stimulus to men.
Samuel Warren
O God if in the day of battle I forget Thee do not Thou forget me.
William King
Our rages daughters of despair creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.
Georges Bernanos
I have lived to thank God that all my prayers have not been answered.
Jean Ingelow
Who rises from prayer a better man his prayer is answered.
George Meredith
Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
George Santayana
I sit beside my lonely fire and pray for wisdom yet: for calmness to remember or courage to forget.
Charles Hamilton Aide
Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless but prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks.
George Meredith
She heard the snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer. She had to cease to pray.
George Meredith
I pray like a robber asking alms at the door of a farmhouse to which he is ready to set fire.
Léon Bloy
Unless I had the spirit of prayer I could do nothing.
Charles G. Finney
He was one of those men who possess almost every gift except the gift of the power to use them.
Charles Kingsley
This is one of the bitter curses of poverty: it leaves no right to be generous.
George Gissing
If you've ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life.
Arnold Bennett
Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.
George R. Gissing
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
Ayn Rand
If any has a stone to throw It is not I ever or now.
Elinor Wylie
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.
George Meredith
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
Honoré de Balzac
I am happy and content because I think I am.
Alain-Rene Lesage
Unhappiness indicates wrong thinking just as ill health indicates a bad regimen.
Paul Bourget
Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise.
Ayn Rand
To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.
Sir Walter Scott
If you are possessed by an idea you find it expressed everywhere you even smell it.
Thomas Mann
The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it and it will in turn look sourly upon you laugh at it and with it and it is a jolly kind companion.
William Makepeace Thackeray
To think of losing is to lose already.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always she had to admit interesting.
May Sarton
I actually remember feeling delight at two o'clock in the morning when the baby woke for his feed because I so longed to have another look at him.
Margaret Drabble
A majority is always better than the best repartee.
Benjamin Disraeli
Damn your principles! Stick to your party!
Benjamin Disraeli
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
Honoré de Balzac
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the air.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.
Maxwell Bodenheim
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
George Santayana
Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg
I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
Robert Graves
There's no money in poetry but then there's no poetry in money either.
Robert Graves
The essentials of poetry are rhythm dance and the human voice.
Earle Birney
Villon our sad bad glad mad brother's name.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Philosophy has a fine saying for everything - for Death it has an entire set.
Laurence Sterne