Quotes by Novelists - Page 89

The lord of light made the sun and moon and stars to light our day, and gave us fire to keep the night at bay.
George R.R. Martin
Am I on my way toward that light? Are we always on our way toward the light like a shining blinding opening out of time and darkness? I ask myself as I walk on. I don't know where these words come from, because I'm not aware that I've ever had such thoughts before or that I've inherited such words. Is that what it's all about? Always under way? Always alone? Under way from this group in the half darkness, from these beings who will always follow us, never completely pale around us, no matter where we are, but who can be found around us in those closest to us, in those we meet, even if we travel across the sea...
Ole Sarvig
These woods are as empty as you think, he had said. You cannot know what the light might summon from the darkness.
George R.R. Martin
No man can walk so long in the Shadow that he cannot come again to the Light.
Robert Jordan
We are creature of darkness and light, capable of barbarism and limitless cruelty, and also love, and laughter and the creation of the most sublime beauty. We are both these things, clearly, but which are we more of?
Mark Frost
We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.
Leonora Carrington
One of the strange laws of the contemplative life," Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, "is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.
Pico Iyer
... a man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn't have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing.
Pico Iyer
She didn't hear him in any nutty way, they didn't sit around and talk politics, it was more a pleasant feeling, easy enough to achieve at Zen-Dojo Tozan but she could even do it here, in the waiting area of the Lucerne airport. She believed that most of the human population didn't avail themselves to their full psychic potential. They lived in a state of mental clutter, the bombardment of goods and services, information and striving. They wouldn't be able to recognize true happiness if it were standing on their foot.
Anne Patchett
But the character of a man is not to be judged from the pictures which he may draw or from the antics which he may play in his solitary hours. Those who act generally with the most consummate wisdom in the affairs of the world, often meditate very silly doings before their wiser resolutions form themselves.
Anthony Trollope
I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.
Edmund Wilson
The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.
George Santayana
No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly...and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.
Murasaki Shikibu
You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
John Irving
I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.
Anthony Powell
She has passed information to you. Figures names and facts. You have learnt nothing very much. But you have a splendid memory. It will help you when you start to learn.
Richard Llewellyn
Anything which begins new and fresh will finally become old and silly. The educational institution is certainly no exception to this, although training the young is by implication an art for old people exclusively, and novelty in education is allied to mutiny. Moreover, the mere process of learning is allied to mutiny. Moreover, the mere process of learning is so excruciating and so bewildering that no conceivable phraseology or combination of philosophies can make it practical as a method of marking time during what might be called the formative years.
Shirley Jackson
Before one can learn truth, one must unlearn lies.
Matthew Woodring Stover
There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world -- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles. The more you understand, the more you look, the greater is your enjoyment of life and your sense of peace. That's all there is to it. Everything else is fun and games. If an activity is not grounded in "to love" or "to learn" it does not have value.
Anne Rice
It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners - to live i n and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space clarity & hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment.
Wallace Stegner
Here we go again. Always a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game; endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on. Push me pull you. Come here and i'll tell you how much i hate you. Hang on a minute while i leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be.
Anne Enright
I don't want you to be young and beautiful. I only want one thing. I want you to be kind-hearted - and not just towards cats and dogs.
Vasily Grossman
Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.
Thomas Mann
He accepted the deformity which had made life so hard for him; he knew that it had warped his character, but no he saw also that by reason of it he had acquired that power of introspection which had given him so much delight. Without it he would never have had his keen appreciation of beauty, his passion for art and literature, and his interest in the varied spectacle of life. […] Then he saw that normal was the rarest thing in the world. Everyone had some defect of body or of mind […] The only reasonable thing was to accept the good of men and be patient with their faults.
W Somerset Maugham
When I think about John William now, I think about someone who followed through, and then I'm glad not to have followed through, to still be breathing, to still be here with people, to still be walking in the mountains, and to still be uncertain--even with all this cash on hand--in a way I seem to have no choice about. I'm a hypocrite, of course, and I live with that, but I live.
David Guterson
The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived. It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one's life.
Ayn Rand
The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
I have it in my head that when we’re born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people’s hearts he writes happy and on some people’s hearts he writes sad and on some people’s hearts he writes crazy and on some people’s hearts he writes genius and on some people’s hearts he writes angry and on some people’s hearts he writes winner and on some people’s hearts he writes loser.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
One the advantages about this life is that you can hate someone without knowing him
Alessandro Manzoni
...life didn't always have to be so serious. That life was to be lived. That life was one great adventure, to be lived well and to the full.
Tillie Cole
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
Langston Hughes
life is too short to despise people who simply can't help what they've done.
John Grisham
What life gives us, good or bad, we seldom deserve.
William Kent Krueger
Do you think it will always be this way?”“What?”“I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?”I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. “I don't know,” I said. “Tomorrow.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
It was a hollow victory they gave me. A crown...it was the girl I prayed them for. Your sister, safe... and mine again as she was meant to be. I ask you, Ned, what good is it to wear a crown?
George R.R. Martin
Let his sword break and his shield shatter, Sansa thought coldly as she shoved out through the doors, let his courage fail him and every man desert him.
George R.R. Martin
Beloved, we join hands here to pray for gin. An aridity defiles us. Our innards thirst for the juice of juniper. Something must be done. The drought threatens to destroy us. Surely, God who let manna fall from the heavens so that the holy children of Israel might eat, will not let the equally holy children of Niggeratti Manor die from the want of a little gin. Children, let us pray.
Wallace Thurman
For a few moments, raising his arms desperately, the Reverend Mouret implored Heaven. His shoulder-blades cracked, with such fantastic force did he pray. But soon enough his arms fell to his sides, his hopes abashed. From heaven came one of those silences utterly void of hope known to the devout.
Émile Zola
I feel the life slipping out of me. When the pain comes, I cry out, but there is no prayer in it, only fear. I kneel and recite my office and the Rosary but the words are empty - dry gourds rattling in the silence. The dark is terrible and I feel so alone. I see no signs but the symbols of contradiction. I try to dispose myself to faith, hope and charity, but my will is a blown reed in the winds of despair.
Morris West
If prayer fails I am in a greater darkness yet, not knowing whether I have presumed too much or believed too little.
Morris West
God promises to hear and answer our prayers, but he doesn't always answer the way we want him to.
Shirley Corder
For Mercier, it was the ceremony of the mass that eased his soul: the sweetish smoke trailing from the censer, the ringing of the bell, the Latin incantations of the priest. In Warsaw, he attended early mass, at a small church near the apartment, once or twice a month, confessing to his vocational sins – duplicity, for example – in the oblique forms provided by Catholic protocol. He’d grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding and prayed for those he’d lost, for those he loved, and for an end to evil in the world.” ― Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw
Alan Furst
Little kids I don't mind. Every kid wants a pony. It's grown-ups that get my robe in a knot. Stop with the begging, okay? Adore me for a change. Or give thanks. I like gratitude. Or ask for guidance. But oh, no. It's always the pony.
Ron Koertge
As your father keeps clean his lamp to have good light, so keep clean your spirit.
Richard Llewellyn
All the seeming "coincidences" .... were actually God catching me in his arms.
Shirley Corder
You must learn to tell worry from thought and thought from prayer. Sometimes a light will go from your life, and a thought becomes a prayer til you are strong enough to stand under the weight of your own thought again.
Richard Llewellyn
Prayers and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
Thomas Mann
It is simple. Men lose their birthrights for a mess of pottage only if they stop using the gifts given them by God for their betterment. By prayer. That is the first and greatest gift. use the gift of prayer. Ask for strength of mind, and a clear vision. Then sense. Use your sense. Not all of us are born for greatness, but all of us have sense. Make use of it. Think. Think long and well. By prayer and good thought you will conquer all enemies....Behold, the night is coming. Prepare, for the time is at hand.
Richard Llewellyn
Worry, my son?...I am not worried now and I never have or will. You must learn to tell worry from thought, and thought from prayer. Sometimes a light will go from your life...and your life becomes a prayer, till you are strong enough to stand under the weight of your own thought again.
Richard Llewellyn
The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
John Berger
What if the drive to survive was a form of faith, a form of prayer?
Anne Rice
She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death.
Gabriel García Márquez
Prayer was not a sacred or holy thing. It was not spoken plainly, in Twi or English. It need not be performed on the knees or with folded palms. For Akua, prayer was a frenzied chant, a language for those desires of the heart that even the mind did not recognize were there.
Yaa Gyasi
To those who have been accustomed to the difficulties and dangers of a sea-faring life, there are no lines which speak more forcibly to the imagination, or prove the beauty and power of the Greek poet, than those in the noble prayer of Ajax:"Lord of earth and air,O king! O father! hear my humble prayer.Dispel this cloud, that light of heaven restore;Give me to see - and Ajax asks no more,If Greece must perish - we Thy will obey;But let us perish in the face of day!
Frederick Marryat
Feeling sorry for myself was an art.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
mia knew the weight that said nothing will ever be different from what it is now, that the world has lost all dimension and has turned to stone.
Sue Saliba
and it was the pretending that might explain how she could smile so brightly while her mind felt nothing - as if, at these times, there existed a disconnection between outer and inner, a shutting off, and the key to her happiness lay in warding off pain, or dodging it, or pushing it into the shape of something else - like shame or anger or even hope.
Sue Saliba
Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.
Edward St. Aubyn
Depressed people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do.
Sue Monk Kidd