Fiction Quotes - Page 18

Maybe that was the best part. The beautiful peace that came with living her own story, knowing every turn of the page and tug of the heart was a new beginning.

A poem can't do its work if you only read snippets of it.

We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.

It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing attainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who's kinda bossy, then I had to basically start liking a whole different person.

Meredith immersed herself in the novels. For some reason, fiction hit on the meaning of life so much more concisely than real life itself did.

Elin Hilderbrand

I once believed that life was a gift. I thought whatever I wanted I would someday possess. Is that greed, or only youth? Is it hope or stupidity? As far as I was concerned the future was a book I could write to suit myself, chapter after chapter of good fortune. All was right with the world, and my place in it was assured, or so I thought then. I had no idea that all stories unfold like white flowers, petal by petal, each in its own time and season, dependant on circumstances and fate. ~ Green Heart, Alice Hoffman

I think the future deserves our faith. But it is hard to argue with Emily Dickinson.

Funny how much we all suffer trying to spare others a bit of pain.

Michael LaRocca

Once I was King of the Titans. Now I need a MedicAlert bracelet and a subscription to the Safe Return program. Can you put out a Silver Alert on a god? I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

Michael LaRocca

I have a question for you. When you were a little boy, is this the man you dreamed of becoming?

Michael LaRocca

Dead. Supposedly Suicide. That's how they'll kill Michael too. Make it look like a suicide or an accident of some sort.

I've learned that the most unbelievable is the most believable.

Schopenhauer wrote that to desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake. He was correct.

Michael LaRocca

I’ve been working on something that merges rap with classical…. I call it Baby’s Got Bach.

Michael LaRocca

I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout’s novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn’t like it, and he says to her, “I already know about human beings.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

At my age, every day that I overcome simple inertia is a victory.

Michael LaRocca

When I label something as fiction, people say it’s true, and when I label something as non-fiction, people say it is made up. If something is not 100% true, then I label it as fiction. After all, there is no half of a lie, is there?

She forgot: it was as simple as that. She just loved being with the guy. Possibly enough that not even their own wedding could screw it up.

Of all God’s creatures, only man kills with malice. Only man kills out of vengeance.

Love is the greatest unseen force in the universe." - Cole

Before the autumn of our years, there exists a time when we struggle to reconcile what we are with what we wish to be. This time can be known as summer. After spring gives us life, before winter takes it away.

I couldn't believe it had taken me all these years to see this side of him. He tucked himself inside a shell, shutting himself away from others here because the palace had trapped him. Behind the books and the snippy remarks there was a curious, engaging, and sometimes very charming person.

There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation… I have no idea why

Joyce Carol Oates

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl. There hadn’t been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.

Joyce Carol Oates

The ocean drummed as loud as pulsating blood, eroding the sand, rushing the beach as if it had a point to prove. And like many things, it receded, was gone, and was replaced anew.

Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.

When I write, I do not like using ten dollar words. I like the fifty-centers. Everybody has fifty-cents, even those that are too proud to admit it.

My spirit has been around far longer than my soul--I've lived several lifetimes already. And one this novel has been written, I will have lived several more.

I think the best fiction is about the absolute irrepressibility of love in the face of every circumstance to the contrary. Even in someone as dark, on the face of it, as Faulkner often is, there is that unquenchable glimmer...."Grace will ever find a way." I don't think fiction has to be hokey, or end up hitting you on the head with positivity, to be life affirming. I think all we have to do is go on down to the bottom of the truth and hang out there in the dark for a bit, with nowhere to go but up, and grace will find a way.

She had traveled to more cities, had experienced more scenes, than anyone she knew, and still she had come away from it all with only an abysmal sense of dissatisfaction. When would it all begin, the good part of this story she was living? When would she find her destiny, her purpose? When would she have the control her mother wielded, the drive her father possessed? When would she cease living the same wretched days over and over? Why was she still feeling empty and meaningless? Why—after all this time—did her purpose in life still escape her?

Carefully studying the delicate form of the doll, she was thinking how easy it was to wish for things as a child. Then nothing seemed impossible. Growing up, one realizes how many things one cannot wish for, the things that are forbidden, sinful. Indecent.

Curiosity is called curiosity because of how curiously it can creep into people’s behavior no matter what dangers are around.

Elizabeth Newton

Even in the gay spots around town, he could walk in and suddenly realize he was the only person of color in the room. He faced questions in all the eyes he greeted. What’s he doing here? Does he think he’s one of us? How ironic that even here in the nation’s self-proclaimed “gay summer capital” he should feel unwanted, excluded.

There is nothing so sexy as a good-looking man in a good-looking pair of shorts.

He could not have faced her right then. He had started to sense their relationship was over, that she wanted more than he could ever give her. They hardly saw each other any longer, had nothing much to discuss, and had even ceased doing the one thing they were good at. Still, to smell the sheets where she had lain brought him a certain peace, lulling him to sleep under the veil of her perfume. He dreamed they were married, running beneath a flurry of white rose petals, and then a door slammed shut, and suddenly he was awake. He was back at Cedar House, and it was night and the room was dark.

Knowing too much had turned him into something else, and he wasn't sure he liked this newer him, although he felt he could not stop being this other him, darker.

You have chosen the path of darkness.

Do not mess with this man's threads!

You can thank Henry Ford for that. He was a warlock, you know.

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

All you need do, Bernie,”she gulped her toast soaked in coffee, “is present the truth as fiction.

My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability, as a child, to lie with a straight face.

The first draft doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be written!

Heather Robinson

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.

There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. “Breaking Bad” kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of “Freedom,” or “My Brilliant Friend,” or “Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.

You scared the crap out of me,” I shove his bare chest with a growl. “Wasthat you at the front door?”“Ya think?” He fires back with a raise of his eyebrows, taking hold of my armagain, as he practically drags me back toward the front entry.“Did it occur to you to say something?” I shoot back with a scowl. “I thoughtyou were some kind of psychopath.” My frown deepens, as I consider whether he might in fact be a psychopath.

With every fall of the sun and rise of the moon, I can hear it. The Prophecy. It echoes through the halls of time. It is written on the surface of every star. Even the sun and moon cannot withhold the news of the second coming. I hear it. And I fear it.

Brian A. McBride

I started to drink heavily, comfortably caught in the tentacle-like clutches of alcohol.

Keith Steinbaum

Characters are just extensions of my madness.

You have filled every fibre of my soul and the spaces in between

I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound." - Carol Kennicott

He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.

Surely, she was too young to have so many ghosts.

Cassandra Clare

I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives

A pall fell over the room. A black shroud of disease and deathbeds and all the worst things from all the worst places. This mutant world, a tragic portmanteau, the unnatural marriage of two roots as different as could be. 'And do you, Ability take Vitriol to be your lawfully wedded suffix?' I wanted to scream objections to the unholy matrimony, but nothing came out. My mouth was clammy and dry, full of sand. Dr. Wilson smiled on, rambling about the benefits of Abilitol while my father nodded like a toy bobblehead immune to the deepening shadow in the room. As they spoke, I caught my mother's eye. I could tell by her face that she felt the deepening shadow too.Neither of us smiled.Neither of us spoke.We felt the shadow together.

The trouble with crying over an onion is that once the chopping gets you started and the tears begin to well up, the next thing you know you just can't stop.

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?

Breathe, Emma. Now is not the time to swoon.

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