Fiction Quotes - Page 32

At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction - it fascinated rather than repelled.

Agatha Christie

When good Americans die, they go to Paris,' the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small cigarette.But you’re not dead. I suppose the question must be, are you good?

Karen Chance

Are you looking for something real in this world of illusions? Call me. Casual Flings need not apply. I am looking for Love.

Aprilynne Pike

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.

Joseph Conrad

Sometimes when you get older — and I’m not talking about you, I’m talking generally, because everyone ages differently — things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they’re part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they’re not true — why, then you get offended because you can’t remember the first part. All you know is that you’ve been called a liar.

Sara Gruen

No, it’s not fair, but what makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. It won’t help the situation for you to get all upset.

Chuck Palahniuk

Every fiction has its base in fact.

Gayle Forman

Truly, it is in loss that we learn a thing's true value.

Jacqueline Carey

...one had to expect very little—almost nothing—from life, Aaron knew, one had to be grateful, not always trying to seize the days like some maniac of living, but to give oneself up, be seized by the days, the months and years, be taken up in the froth of sun and moon, some pale and smoothie-ed river-cloud of life, a long, drawn-out, gray sort of enlightenment, so that when it was time to die, one did not scream swear words and knock things down, did not make a scene, but went easily with understanding and tact, and quietly, in a lightly pummeled way, having been consoled–having allowed to be consoled–by the soft, generous, worthlessness of it all, having allowed to be massaged by the daily beating of life, instead of just beaten.

Tao Lin

How did you hear about that?''Are you kidding me? So far, I had that runt Kyle-''I hate him. I hate all vamps. That complete toad, Michael-''-tell me you were pregnant by a vamp-''kidnnaped me and-Kyle said WHAT?''and then a member of the Domi shows up and informs me-''The Domi sent someone HERE?''-that you're actually pregnant by the late king of the Fey.''Late?!' Heidar squeaked.

Karen Chance

Infatuation burns itself out,' she says. 'Friendship mixed with old chemistry--that can last a lifetime.

Tess Callahan

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.

James Wood

The Countess was considerably younger than her husband. All of her clothes came from Paris (this was after Paris) and she had superb taste. (This was after taste too, but only just. And since it was such a new thing, and since the Countess was the only lady in all Florin to posses it, is it any wonder she was the leading hostess in the land?)

William Goldman

Louis-Cesare slowly pulled himself into a half-standing position against the side of the winery.'What? Did you think one little mage was going to do me in?' He swallowed hard. 'Hell, that was just a warm-up.

Karen Chance

I was trying to have an insight, and all I could think of was that I'd backed myself into a corner, and the corner was me.

John Welter

Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. (You Shall Know Our Velocity)

Dave Eggers

For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise - that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.

Amor Towles

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

Peter Carey

You wanted us all back together again!" Bonnie shouted at Caroline, and pulled the scandalized girl into the dance. Meredith, her dignity forgotten, joined them too. And for a long time in the clearing there was only rejoicing.

L.J. Smith

It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.

Elizabeth Kostova

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

Ralph Ellison

You are there and to their ears, being a Syrian sounds like you’re unclean, shameful, indecent; it’s like you owe the world an apology for your very existence.

Asaad Almohammad

Ivy turned. 'He bit you on the neck?' she said, deadpan serious but for her eyes. 'Oh, then it's got to be love. She won't let me bite her neck.

Kim Harrison

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

Umberto Eco

It was only when the giant got halfway down the incline that he suddenly, happily, burst into flame and continued his trip saying, "NO SURVIVORS, NO SURVIVORS!" in a manner that could only indicate deadly sincerity.It was seeing him happily burning and advancing that startled the Brute Squad to screaming. And once that happened, why, everybody panicked and ran...

William Goldman

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.

Stanisław Lem

Annoyed?” said Sophie. “Why should I be annoyed? Someone only filled the castle with rotten aspic, and deafened everyone in Porthaven, and scared Calcifer to a cinder, and broke a few hundred hearts. Why should that annoy me?

Diana Wynne Jones

Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.

Jasper Fforde

...Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.

Henry Jenkins

When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst-but it wasn't a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you'd been missing.

Jodi Picoult

Love"I'm in love with you," he said quietly."Augustus,"I said."I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.""Augustus," I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back. I couldn't say anything back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.

John Green

I have seen many cases like N. during the five years I've been in practice. I sometimes picture these unfortunates as men and women being pecked to death by predatory birds. The birds are invisible - at least until a psychiatrist who is good, or lucky, or both, sprays them with his version of Luminol and shines the right light on them - but they are nevertheless very real. The wonder is that so many OCDs manage to live productive lives, just the same. They work, they eat (often not enough or too much, it's true), they go to movies, they make love to their girlfriends and boyfriends, their wives and husbands . . . and all the time those birds are there, clinging to them and pecking away little bits of flesh.

Stephen King

The blind faith in some half-assed conspiracy theories lines up with the logic of having to believe in something with no questions asked. It gives us peace and comfort. As simple as I was, I found that resorting to this absolute nonsense was the root of all our problems. It was a road of willingly-learned helplessness, for no action could make a difference, thereby no action was needed.

Asaad Almohammad

Can't say I've ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending anytime. You know where you are with an ending.

Neil Gaiman

I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist.

Berkeley Breathed

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

Marvin Minsky

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

Orson Scott Card

Gods, I love this place," Locke said, drumming his fingers against his thighs. "Sometimes I think this whole city was put here simply because the gods must adore crime. Pickpockets rob the common folk, merchants rob anyone they can dupe, Capa Barsavi robs the robbers and the common folk, the lesser nobles rob nearly everyone, and Duke Nicovante occasionally runs off with his army and robs the shit out of Tal Verarr or Jerem, not to mention what he does to his own nobles and his common folk.

Scott Lynch

I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.

Nick Hornby

Tally smiled. At least she was causing trouble to the end. "I'm Tally Youngblood," she said. "make me pretty.

Scott Westerfeld

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.

Haruki Murakami

C’est moi, c’est moi,’tis I,' I told him. It seemed appropriately melodramatic, though I didn’t know if he’d catch the reference. I shouldn’t have worried. Unexpectedly, he laughed. “Trust you to quote Lancelot rather than Guinevere.

Patricia Briggs

While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Ursula K Le Guin

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

Michael Scott

Elena gasped back, "I can touch the ground!""I can see you touching it!", Bonnie exclaimed with tears of joy.

L.J. Smith

Tatiana: "Why did we spend two days fighting when we could have been doing this?"Alexander: "That wasn't fighting, Tatiana. That was foreplay.

Paullina Simons

Is where you're from the place you're leaving or where you have roots?

Sara Gruen

You know I love you,' said the other mother flatly.'You have a very funny way of showing it,' said Coraline.

Neil Gaiman

But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I am self-educated from genre books.

Charlaine Harris

I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I've also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It's sure to be a phony.

Roald Dahl

Patience is only a virtue when there is something worth waiting for.

Lauren Willig

No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

I try to be a good cop. I try to be a good little soldier and follow orders up to a point. But in the end I’m not really a cop, or a soldier. I am a legally sanctioned murderer. I am the Executioner.

Laurell K. Hamilton

We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them.

Shane L. Koyczan

everything happens for a reason.

Lemony Snicket

But a slow, deeply satisfied smile came over him, and his breath quickened. 'So softly it starts,' he whispered. 'Foolishly clever and with an unsurvivable trust. It just saved your miserable life, that questionable show of thought, my itchy-witch.' Al’s smile shifted, becoming lighter. 'And now you will live to possibly regret it.

Kim Harrison

Friendship isn't always sunnyside up.

Jerry Spinelli

Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.

John Green

Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.

Stephenie Meyer

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Fiction Quotes - Page 32

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