Quotes by Novelists - Page 85

You cannot penalize a man for one slip. Then she lay wondering about the word slip. When you slip, you fall, but maybe it is not such a sore fall because you have slipped.
Jackie Kay
Sometimes she thought the Creator had only made men to cause trouble for women.
Robert Jordan
She influenced by the positivism of her race, was gazing into the future. While he was content with the present moment, not caring to know what would be the end of their love
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
Armando was the only man who'd been patient enough to chase after me. After he had caught me, he'd done what every man loves to do when he has found the woman of his dreams: take her for granted.
Josefina López
The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.
Ayn Rand
Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.
John dos Passos
I always thought of men as being hard—maybe because I was hard. But there was a softness in Tom that betrayed his large masculine hands and his deep baritone voice. He knew something about love that I didn’t. I don’t know where he’d learned it, but it wasn’t something you got from a book, not something you could learn in an online class, not something you could borrow. Maybe it was something you were born with. Some people knew how to love and some people didn’t. Tom was the former. I was the latter. I didn’t know which one of us had it worse
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Men come and go. They lie, or die, or leave you. A mountain is not a man, though, and a stone is a mountain's daughter. I trust myself, and I trust my mules. I won't fall.
George R.R. Martin
The gods are blind and men see only wha they wish.
George R.R. Martin
The gods are blind and men see only what they wish.
George R.R. Martin
Entering the front door, you were at once assailed by a nightmare of cheerlessness and squalor, all the sordid melancholy, at its worst, of any nest of bedrooms where only men sleep;
Anthony Powell
The conversations of men had always been muddy rivers, the surface's roiling a reflection of what's buried, but the bottom some mysterious thing that would always be hidden.
David Joy
If only my genitals didn't floatWhen I relaxed in the bathAnd we both looked down and we both agreedIt's stupid to be a man
Leonard Cohen
Garp didn't want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.
John Irving
A pessimist is a man who tells the truth prematurely.
Cyrano de Bergerac
Men are always optimists when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look around them.
Ouida
I can’t bear the smell of cigars, can you?” said Lady Partridge.t“Lionel hates it too,” murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of other men’s tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows.
Alan Hollinghurst
In the years after the death of Petrus, Hillegond had refused all offers of marriage, certain that her knowledge of men, despite her uncountable intimate encounters with them, was seriously bescrewed. Further, she grew certain from a recurring nightmare that should she ever consider a man as a second spouse, he would strangle her in her bed with a ligature.
William Kennedy
One way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with less guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sports and gambled on it. He had never looked at that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe.
James Jones
All men are fools, if truth be told, but the ones in motley are more amusing than ones with crowns.
George R.R. Martin
Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature?
Honoré de Balzac
Facing them (men) with knives and spears was much easier than loving them, much easier.
Robert Jordan
The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.
Steve Berry
A woman has to look good, but a man—a little bit nicer looking than a monkey is enough.
Meir Shalev
What chilling blows we suffer-thanks to our conflicting wills-whenever we show these mortal men some kindness.
Steve Berry
And what of failure?"He shrugged."The consequence of not succeesing.Remember what Homer said.Circumstances rule men,not men circumstances.
Steve Berry
Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex...
Gustave Flaubert
...Gentlemen don't understand anything, however wise they may be.
Georgette Heyer
You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.
Hilary Mantel
it never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.
Muriel Spark
I gave myself to you sooner than I ever did to any man, I swear to you; and do you know why? Because when you saw me spitting blood you took my hand; because you wept; because you are the only human being who has ever pitied me. I am going to say a mad thing to you: I once had a little dog who looked at me with a sad look when I coughed; that is the only creature I ever loved. When he died I cried more than when my mother died. It is true that for twelve years of her life she used to beat me. Well, I loved you all at once, as much as my dog. If men knew what they can have for a tear, they would be better loved and we should be less ruinous to them.
Alexandre Dumas fils
I like men to behave like men. I like them strong and childish.
Françoise Sagan
Advice!Nobody tells us how to be men. We just are." "That is probably why you make such a bad job of it.- Perrin and Egwene
Robert Jordan
It was a gusty day, and from the windows of Caroline's top-floor flat, only the sky was visible with its little hurrying clouds. It was a day when being indoors was meaningful, wasting an afternoon in superior confidences with a friend before the two-barred electric heater.
Muriel Spark
It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.
Sinclair Lewis
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
Lord, thank you for the people who care more about me than about their schedules.
Shirley Corder
Friendship is genuine when two friends can enjoy each others company without speaking a word to one another.
George Ebers
Irony of "importance": Those who deserve, don't get it; Those who don't, get it in abundance by you.
Shivam Singh
People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another.("The Honeymoon Of Mrs. Smith" - Version 1)
Shirley Jackson
But the thing is, I didn't make my friends happy and they didn't make me happy. All we did was get stoned out of our minds. That didn't have anything to do with happiness.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Well, it is very odd of you to threaten to throw your friends out of the window, I must say," remarked Juliana.He smiled. "Not at all. It is only my friends that I would throw out of the window.""Dear me!" said Juliana, finding the male sex incomprehensible.-Chapter XIII
Georgette Heyer
Hatred or disliking for someone is something that doesn't come easily but once it comes, it make sure not to leave your heart and mind and stay there either for ever or a long time.
Shivam Singh
Our enemies leave our bodies for the crows and the wolves. Our friends bury us in secret graves.
George R.R. Martin
The first time Enokizu met me, the first words he said were: "You look like an ape."When someone is that outrageously rude, it's hard to be angry.
Natsuhiko Kyogoku
Okay, let’s pretend to be friends. Just two friends having dinner.” “That doesn’t work in the South. A male friend cannot have dinner with a female friend if the male friend has a wife. It just doesn’t work down here.” “Why not?” “Because men don’t have female friends. No way. I don’t know of a single man in the entire South who is married and has a female friend. I think it goes back to the Civil War.” “I think it goes back to the Dark Ages. Why are Southern women so jealous?” “Because that’s the way we’ve trained them. They learned from us. If my wife met a male friend for lunch or dinner, I’d tear his head off and file for divorce. She learned it from me.” “That makes absolutely no sense.” “Of course it doesn’t.” “Your wife has no male friends?” “None that I know of. If you learn of any, let me know.” “And you have no female friends?” “Why would I want female friends? They can’t talk about football, or duck hunting, or politics, or lawsuits, or anything that I want to talk about. They talk about kids, clothes, recipes, coupons, furniture, stuff I know nothing about. No, I don’t have any female friends. Don’t want any.” “That’s what I love about the South. The people are so tolerant.” “Thank you.
John Grisham
old stories are like old friends (...) you have to visit them from time to time.
George R.R. Martin
I felt part of a group for the first time in my life. Not a family, just a group of people who liked being together, who sat as we did, leaning towards each other, leaving just the right amount of space in between, whose thoughts and words flowed easily and naturally, whose voices and accents were so different from each other and yet mingled in harmony as though in a song.
Indu Muralidharan
At home in the nursery, I usually played alone. Actually, I seldom played, I spoke to the wallpaper. The many dark circles in the pattern of the wallpaper seemed like people to me. I made up stories in which they appeared, either I told them the stories or they played with me, I never got tired of the wallpaper people and I could talk to them for hours.
Elias Canetti
He was still experimenting with kissing girls even though he said he'd rather be kissing boys. That's exactly what he said. I didn't know exactly what to think about that, but Dante was going to be Dante and it I was going to be his friend, I would just have to learn to be okay with it.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
You know you're my best friend, right?' he said.I shrugged. I guessed it was true. Now that I wasn't going to be at the parade, they would all hate me. Everything had been carefully choreographed, and me not being there would throw them all off. I realized that kids like Theo and me weren't supposed to have real friends. We were supposed to be all alone and confused. By being each other's friend, we were defying our laws of gravity.
Heather O'Neill
In the first place it's not true that people improve as you know them better: they don't. That's why one should only have acquaintances and never make friends. An acquaintance shows you only the best of himself, he's considerate and polite, he conceals his defects behind a mask of social convention; but we grow so intimate with him that he throws the mask aside, get to know him so well that he doesn't trouble any longer to pretend; then you'll discover a being of such meanness, of such trivial nature, of such weakness, of such corruption, that you'd be aghast if you didn't realize that that was his nature and it was just as stupid to condemn him as to condemn the wolf because he ravens or the cobra because he strikes.
W Somerset Maugham
When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?
John Irving
I've always been puzzled, and am still at this moment in a state of confusion, between the imaginative world and the real world. It is perfectly true to say that I have at some times in my life found that the imaginative world had pushed the real world right out of the way, and was literally more real.
William Golding
When people go away they vanish, turn to nothing, stop being. They live only in memories, haunting the imagination.
Dezső Kosztolányi
Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.
Anthony Powell
Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors...
Joseph Conrad
Let those who smile at me, ask themselves whether they have been indebted most to imagination or reality for all they have enjoyed in life, if indeed they have ever enjoyed any thing.
Charles Robert Maturin
In Ruth's view, they looked 'like a couple' because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them - they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever imagine such nonsense. (In part, it was because of her perverse ability to imagine anything that in this instance Ruth failed to imagine the obvious)
John Irving
Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She didn’t believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.
Dionne Brand