Fiction Quotes - Page 31

...all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.

Rebecca Makkai

So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

Zora Neale Hurston

But now she could not bear the way she sounded. She was not a person anyone could love....And thus fled to her room. There she wept, bitterly, an ugly sound punctuated by great gulps. She could not stop herself. She could hear his footsteps in the passage outside. He walked up and down, up and down.'Come in,' she prayed. 'Oh dearest, do come in.'But he did not come in. He would not come in. This was the man she had practically contracted to give away her fortune to. He offered to marry her as a favour and then he would not even come into her room.Later, she could smell him make himself a sweet pancake for his lunch. She thought this a childish thing to eat, and selfish, too. If he were a gentleman he would now come to her room and save her from the prison her foolishness had made for her. He did not come. She heard him pacing in his room.

Peter Carey

When I first submerged my feet into frigid water, they hurt so badly I yanked them out again. I persisted, dunking them for longer and longer periods, until the cold finally blistered.

Sara Gruen

In darkness there is death.

Bob Mayer

Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.

Daniel Keyes

In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.

Haruki Murakami

It doesn’t matter what other people think when you’re right - John Cleaver

Dan Wells

Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.

Satyajit Ray

Writing a novel is agony.

George Orwell

Sow a thought and reap an action, sow an action and reap a habit, sow a habit and reap a destiny - John Cleaver

Dan Wells

When you touch a man's body, he will enjoy the moment, when you touch a man's heart he will remember it forever.

Dixie Waters

Happily ever after?" "If justice doesn't triumph and love doesn't make the circle in entertainment fiction, what's the point? Real life sucks too often.

Nora Roberts

The masses-I love em-they rush for red lights, risking everything to capture a few seconds, only to get home and waste their lives.

Arthur Nersesian

It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.

Ann Patchett

Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.

Mitch Albom

Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef. Timing is everything.

Meg Rosoff

Honor is for the living. Dead is dead.

Drew Karpyshyn

All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?

Milan Kundera

Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.

Salman Rushdie

You know when I told you the joke about how a friend will help you move, but a real friend will help you move a body? I was only kidding.

Brad Thor

In real life I do violence, but for psychic stuff I do other things better.

Laurell K. Hamilton

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

Martin Amis

What happens when two introverts collide? Do they dissolve completely in each other’s patience and silence, or do they break their glass shells and become new people?

Kanza Javed

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

Orson Scott Card

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

Vladimir Nabokov

They say that right before you die your whole life flashes before you – a medley of your own personal greatest hits. Well then, I must be about to live, because events that haven’t happened yet are constantly pushing themselves into my head.

Emlyn Chand

All marriages have their bad sides, because people have weaknesses. If you live with another human being you learn to handle these weaknesses in a variety of ways. For instance, you might take the view that weaknesses are a bit like heavy pieces of furniture, and based on this you must learn to clean around them. To maintain the illusion.

Fredrik Backman

Any capitalist . . . who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don't you go and do it?

Charles Dickens

Help me give up my addiction to Hope.

Chuck Palahniuk

With the Black Company series Glen Cook single-handedly changed the face of fantasy—something a lot of people didn’t notice and maybe still don’t. He brought the story down to a human level, dispensing with the cliché archetypes of princes, kings, and evil sorcerers. Reading his stuff was like reading Vietnam War fiction on peyote.

Steven Erikson

Oh,to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn to dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, the wall, as ever. Alexander, my nights, my days, my every thought. You will fall away from me in just a while, won't you, and I'll be whole again, and I will go on and feel for someone else, the way everyone does. But my innocence is forever gone.

Paullina Simons

Going for it and changing what you could change-that's what success was all about.

Julie Garwood

We all have the best laid plans for our children, and they go and ruin it all by growing up any way they want to. What the hell was it all for, then? (Real Life and Liars)

Kristina Riggle

Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

Douglas Adams

No offense, Jaron, but I don't want your life. Even locked away behind closed doors I got a taste for how awful it can be.""Did anyone try to kill you while I was gone?""No.""Then you didn't even get a taste.

Jennifer A. Nielsen

Be careful who you choose as your friends because their bad habits can become your bad habits. Choose wisely...we all have a choice in life.

Mimi Jenkins

He was having more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.**Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all—except possibly on an organic level—had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night.

Neil Gaiman

Jane woke, stretched, and decided to kill herself. If she hadn’t found a reason to live by the end of the day she would jump from the rig. It felt good to have a plan.

Adam Baker

I think fiction allows us to sit for a while with people we would rather not meet.

Uwem Akpan

The lights were off so that his heads could avoid looking at each other because neither of them was currently a particular engaging sight, nor had they been since he had made the error of looking into his soul.It had indeed been an error.It had been late one night-- of course.It had been a difficult day-- of course.There had been soulful music playing on the ship's sound system-- of course.And he had, of course, been slightly drunk.In other words, all the usual conditions that bring on a bout of soul searching had applied, but it had, nevertheless, clearly been an error.

Douglas Adams

When you see a small change in your life it means its a huge change in personality and your trait

Natasha Friend

But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it's as though knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.

Diana Gabaldon

Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.

Terry Pratchett

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.

John Gardner

Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.

Chuck Palahniuk

In relationship there are always two types of person: one weaker and the other stronger one. It's never easier to live being as weaker one!

Chetan Bhagat

From a distance,' he says, 'my car looks just like every other car on the freeway, and Sarah Byrnes looks just like the rest of us. And if she's going to get help, she'll get it from herself or she'll get it from us. Let me tell you why I brought this up. Because the other day when I saw how hard it was for Mobe to go to the hospital to see her, I was embarrassed that I didn't know her better, that I ever laughed at one joke about her. I was embarrassed that I let some kid go to school with me for twelve years and turned my back on pain that must be unbearable. I was embarrassed that I haven't found a way to include her somehow the way Mobe has.'Jesus. I feel tears welling up, and I see them running down Ellerby's cheeks. Lemry better get a handle on this class before it turns into some kind of therapy group.So,' Lemry says quietly, 'your subject will be the juxtaposition of man and God in the universe?'Ellerby shakes his head. 'My subject will be shame.

Chris Crutcher

This book is so interesting. I always wonder what's going to happen next.

Neal Shusterman

Grimes believed in what he did, with no doubts. Though he was older than me by over a decade, I suddenly felt old. Some things mark your soul, not in years but in blood and pain and selling off parts of yourself to get the bad guys, until you finally look in the mirror and aren’t sure which side you’re on anymore. There comes a point when having a badge doesn’t make you the good guy, it just makes you one of the guys. I needed to be one of the good guys, or what the hell was I doing?

Laurell K. Hamilton

For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.

Virginia Woolf

The other raised his club and attacked L, who inexpliciably fell over on his back like an overturned frog.

Tsugumi Ohba

Beckon The Sea,I'll Come To The....Shed Seven Tears, Perchance Seven Years....

Terri Farley

L shot Maki a disappointed look. But soon he forgot everything when Misa Amane appeared onstage. Enraptured he began to cheer with the girls in black lace and frilly skirts.

Tsugumi Ohba

As I raced out of the office, I could hear Emily rapid-fire dialing four-digit extensions and all but screaming, 'She's on her way-- tell everyone.' It took me only three seconds to wind through the hallways and pass through the fashion department, but I had already heard panicked cries of 'Emily said she's on her way in' and 'Miranda's coming!' and a particularly blood curdling cry of 'She's baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

Lauren Weisberger

You've a pretty good nerve," said Ratchett. "Will twenty thousand dollars tempt you?"It will not."If you're holding out for more, you won't get it. I know what a thing's worth to me."I, also M. Ratchett."What's wrong with my proposition?"Poirot rose. "If you will forgive me for being personal - I do not like your face, M. Ratchett," he said.

Agatha Christie

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

Herman Wouk

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

Fay Weldon

A person with autism lives in his own world, while a person with Asperger's lives in our world, in a way of his own choosing

Nicholas Sparks

T.G.T.B.T: too good to be true.

Madonna

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Fiction Quotes - Page 31

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