Quotes by Novelists - Page 94

But then something happened, Ray, something amazing. Something..."That white cop sitting next to me? He took a long look at my mother when she came in, just like, absorbed her, and then without even turning to me, he just put his hand on my back, up between my neck and shoulder..."And all he did was squeeze. Give me a little squeeze of sympathy, then rubbed that same spot with his palm for maybe two, three seconds, and that was it."But I swear to you, nobody, in my entire life up to that point had ever touched me with that kind of tenderness. I had never experienced a sympathetic hand like that, and Ray, it felt like lightning."I mean, the guy did it without thinking, I'm sure. And when dinnertime rolled around he had probably forgotten all about it. Forgot about me, too, for that matter... But I didn't forget."I didn't walk around thinking about it nonstop either, but something like seven years later when I was at community college? The recruiting officer for the PD came on campus for Career Day, and I didn't really like college all that much to begin with, so I took the test for the academy, scored high, quit school and never looked back."And usually when I tell people why I became a cop I say because it would keep Butchie and Antoine out of my life, and there's some truth in that."But I think the real reason was because that recruiting officer on campus that day reminded me, in some way, you know, conscious or not, of that housing cop who had sat on the bench with me when I was thirteen."In fact, I don't think it, I know it. As sure as I'm standing here, I know I became a cop because of him. For him. To be like him. God as my witness, Ray. The man put his hand on my back for three seconds and it rerouted my life for the next twenty-nine years."It's the enormity of small things... Adults, grown-ups, us, we have so much power... And sometimes when we find ourselves coming into contact with certain kinds of kids? Needy kids? We have to be ever so careful...
Richard Price
Destiny doesn't do home visits... you have to go for it yourself.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
My whole life has been pledged to this meeting with you...
Alexander Pushkin
It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.
W Somerset Maugham
Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I will walk by myself and cure myself in the sunshine and the wind.
Charles Reznikoff
...but doth not the person who expends vast sums in the furniture of his house or the ornaments of his person, who consumes much time and employs great pains in dressing himself, or who thinks himself paid for self-denial, labour, or even villany, by a title or a ribbon, sacrifice as much to vanity as the poor wit who is desirous to read you his poem or his play?
Henry Fielding
It seems to me that we do live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherant, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherant. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like.
William Golding
I eat you, life; you make me living eat.
William Kean Seymour
It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing.
Tim O'Brien
All that really matters isto feel alive, if only for a single moment –to feel in Intense Sensationthat our existence is not an endless repetitionof sleeping, eating, drinking, and dressing.
Pietros Maneos
Sing, then. Sing, indeed, with shoulders back, and head up so that song might go to the roof and beyond to the sky. Mass on mass of tone, with a hard edge, and rich with quality, every single note a carpet of colour woven from basso profundo, and basso, and baritone, and alto, and tenor, and soprano, and also mezzo, and contralto, singing and singing, until life and all things living are become a song.O, Voice of Man, organ of most lovely might.
Richard Llewellyn
Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.
Muriel Spark
Ralph chose the firm strip as a path because he needed to think, and only here could he allow his feet to move without having to watch them. Suddenly, pacing by the water, he was overcome with astonishment. He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
William Golding
What separated the living from one another could be as impenetrable as whatever barrier separated the living from the dead.
Joshua Ferris
Those that can be troubled to muse upon the meaning of life are general disappointed when they figure it out.
Jasper Fforde
I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
John Fowles
Life's more important than a living. So many people who make a living are making death, not life. Don't ever join them. They're the gravediggers of our civilization - The safe men. The compromisers. The moneymakers. The muddlers-through. Politics is full of them... so is businesses... so is the church. They're popular. Successful. Some of them work hard, other are slack, but all of them could tell a good story. Never where there such charming gravediggers in the world's history.
James Hilton
Fear does not prevent death. It prevents life.
Naguib Mahfouz
To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.
Kingsolver Barbara
The living have no place at the feasts of the dead.
George R.R. Martin
There was nothing so very unfamiliar about the excitement she was feeling, and yet it felt always like a new excitement. It was, in other words, a perennially unfamiliar feeling.
Sōseki Natsume
He seemed to become aware of a dark, imponderable force pushing him left when he meant to go right or pulling him back when he meant to go forward. Until that moment, hewould have felt certain that his actions had never been subject to restraintby others. He had been certain that he did whatever he did of his ownaccord, that everything he said he intended to say.
Sōseki Natsume
Europe, the land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts. The land where the economy gets to stagger all over the continent.
Núria Añó
And maybe that is what it comes down to, knowing what the other person needs even before they know it themselves. Maybe it’s just that simple and it is only us who make it complicated with our anniversaries and our gifts, with grand declarations and public demonstrations, empty words and valuable stones.
Shitij Sharma
To die or not to die, that is the question; it is nobler to live in torment and rage than not to live at all?
Anne Rice
The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and a Plato have much to say; but those who have imposed cautions on themselves and petrified themselves in a system of ideas, them the masters themselves will lead into error
Thornton Wilder
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
George Santayana
Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.
Anne Michaels
Living as I do with human beings, the more that I observe them, the more I am forced to conclude that they are selfish.
Sōseki Natsume
I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.
Naguib Mahfouz
Growing up is never straight forward.There are moments when everything is fine, and other moments where you realize that there are certain memories that you'll never get back, and certain people that are going to change, and the hardest part is knowing thatthere's nothing you can do except watch them.
Alden Nowlan
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
John Irving
Day followed day, and night followed night, until Dany knew she could not endure a moment longer. She would kill herself rather than go on, she decided one night... Yet when she slept that night, she dreamt the dragon dream again. Viserys was not in it this time. There was only her and the dragon. Its scales were black as night, wet and slick with blood. Her blood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten magma and when it opened its mouth, the flame came roaring out in a hot jet. She could hear it singing to her. She opened her arms to the fire, embraced it, let it swallow her whole, let it cleanse her and temper her and scour her clean. She could feel her flesh sear and blacken and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to steam, and yet there was no pain. She felt strong and new and fierce. And the next day, strangely, she did not seem to hurt quite as much.
George R.R. Martin
Free folk don't follow names, or little cloth animals sewn on a tunic," the King-Beyond-the-Wall had told him. "They won't dance for coins, they don't care how your style yourself or what that chain of office means or who your grandsire was. They follow strength. They follow the man.
George R.R. Martin
Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime, with a gift of tears;Grief, with a glass that ran;Pleasure, with pain for leaven;Summer, with flowers that fell;Remembrance, fallen from heaven,And madness risen from hell;Strength without hands to smite;Love that endures for a breath;Night, the shadow of light,And Life, the shadow of death.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
She did not suspect that the Abbess was even there hovering about the house, herself estimating the stresses and watching for the moment when a burden harms and not strengthens.
Thornton Wilder
The yard consisted of grass and a Russian Olive tree, which was about the only kind of tree able to survive on the high prairies. Its thin, grey leaves made it look as though it were on the verge of dying, thereby fooling the elements and the bad weather into thinking that they didn't have to bother with something so spindly and bent, something so obviously on its last legs.
Thomas King
It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.
Joseph Conrad
Summer is the time for squabbles. In winter, we must protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths.
George R.R. Martin
Prayer is only another name for good, clean, direct thinking. When you pray, think well what you are saying, and make your thoughts into things that are solid. In that manner, your prayer will have strength, and that strength shall become part of you, mind, body, and spirit.
Richard Llewellyn
She reminded him that the weak will never enter the kingdom of love, which is a harsh and ungenerous kingdom,and that women give themselves only to men of resolute spirit, who provide them with the security they need in order to face life.
Gabriel García Márquez
I'll never be the size that has single digits and my thighs will always touch when I walk but I'm ok with that.
Sugar Jamison
Mama is beautiful,” I said.“Mama is strong,” he said. “Beauty comes and goes. Strength, you keep forever.
Lawrence Hill
In social life we hardly stop to consider how much of that daring spirit which gives mastery comes from hardness of heart rather than from high purpose, or true courage. The man who succumbs to his wife, the mother who succumbs to her daughter, the master who succumbs to his servant, is as often brought to servility by a continual aversion to the giving of pain, by a softness which causes the fretfulness of others to be an agony to himself,—as by any actual fear which the firmness of the imperious one may have produced. There is an inner softness, a thinness of the mind's skin, an incapability of seeing or even thinking of the troubles of others with equanimity, which produces a feeling akin to fear; but which is compatible not only with courage, but with absolute firmness of purpose, when the demand for firmness arises so strongly as to assert itself.
Anthony Trollope
Then a begging brother in a tattered brown robe said a blessing on his sword, and a maid kissed his cheek. 'They are for me,' "Why?" He asked Pate. "What am I to them?" "A knight who remembered his vows," the smith said.
George R.R. Martin
Justice without strength isn't justice at all.
Shinjirou
A great battle is a terrible thing," the old knight said, "but in the midst of blood and carnage, there is sometimes also beauty, beauty that could break your heart.
George R.R. Martin
He was a pitiful thing. He had always been a pitiful thing. Why had she never seen that before? There was a hollow place inside her where her fear had been.
George R.R. Martin
Strength to your arm, then.
George R.R. Martin
... People were never quite what you thought they were.
William Golding
Can you drown in grief? She turned away sharply, angry with her own frailty. She had no time for the luxury of self-pity.
George R.R. Martin
What makes the strength of the soldier isn't the energy he uses trying to intimidate the other guy by sending him a whole lot of signals, it's the strength he's able to concentrate within himself, by staying centered. That Maori player was like a tree, a great indestructible oak with deep roots and a powerful radiance- everyone could feel it. And yet you also got the impression that the great oak could fly, that it would be as quick as the wind, despite, or perhaps because of, its deep roots.
Muriel Barbery
The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.
Robert Jordan
Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.
John Irving
It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it.
W Somerset Maugham
Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trendis statism. Philosophically, the goal is theobliteration of reason;psychologically, it is theerosion of ambition.
Ayn Rand
What use were his talons and fangs to the dying tiger? In the clutches, say, to make matters worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn't there.
Malcolm Lowry
I am tempted to find reason and justice in the fact that he died as violently and indecently as he lived. But that is too ingenuous a way out. It does not explain Dimitrios; it only apologizes for him. Special sorts of conditions must exist for the creation of the special sort of criminal that he typified...all I do know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, those conditions will obtain.
Eric Ambler