Fiction Quotes - Page 41

No man's advice can change you unless you speak to yourself. Bible school or seminars can't change you, going to church can't change you except you decide to change.Psalm 139:23 - 24

Patience Johnson

If you are going to write a book,Make sure it is going to be worth reading .

Book Editor Angelina

It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life — its facility, its use.

William H. Gass

[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more.

Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

And so we continued to live in fear, hoping that we would not get caught. Fear had become our constant companion at this dreadful Lashkar-e-Taiba camp.

Vivek Pereira

The silence was worse than the gunshots. The wait worse than the confusion. The forebode worsethan any danger.

Willowy Whisper

After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.

Andrew Wilson

Most of our fears are borrowed. Since that’s the case, we should get busy returning them.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Too often fear is fiction madly running amuck, all the while madly tracking ‘muck’ across the floor of fact.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Regarding beliefs and belief systems: We argue what and how we feel, rather than what we - actually - know or assume to be facts or factual evidence. Thus, it is justifiably prudent to challenge that which has been adopted or enforced by tradition. If such examination is discouraged by fearful tactics - we must not shy away from soulful searching.

T.F. Hodge

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

Kathryn Hurn

What Joab did not and could not know was that it was ego, and the ego of a king is just like the ego of anyone else. It is a social infection, entering each person as a psychological virus that is passed on by their parents’ egos and other social stimuli. It is born of negativity—of not being good enough thoughts of not having enough, of fear, and worry of failure. Because of its insecure nature, the ego loves to dominate and control others. It’s control or be controlled.

Marco Raye

Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.

Mary Rose O'Reilley

And once you've been to this Center, this Truth, you'll know your way everywhere. You are never lost again.

David Housholder

The story was heavy in her hands, the book spread open like legs, the letters very small i spite of describing such a big moment

Natalia Jaster

The pain is real. Flowing as a brook beneath my flesh. I am broken, and yet, I still breathe.

E.M. Benton

I never said you had to like it. You have to accept it. No regret. - Claire Harding - Boone Holler

Lizzi Cruz

Non-fiction is to theory as fiction is to experience.

Joyce Rachelle

Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Oscar always said that books are truly our best friends. He said that they never think poorly of us and that they always have a shoulder for us to cry on or relieve stress. They take our minds away from the real world by telling us captivating stories. When we look back at our choice of books, we can nostalgically recall our younger years.

Erica Sehyun Song

These scars that we have... they don't go away. They only fade with time, but they're still hauntingly there.

Taylor Keys

Every book has to wait for the right time to be read and understood.

Kamand Kojouri

What is so addictive about fiction is that it is the one reliable place in which we can apprehend and participate in - fully understand - the inward world of another person.

Rick Gekoski

She died without us by her side, and now, we are left with the scars. In time, perhaps they will fade, but for now, they're still hauntingly there reminding us of the loss and pain.

Sophie Palmer

There's no difference between pulp fiction and highbrow fiction, one is as good as the other, the only difference is the aura they have, and that's determined by the people who read the stuff, not by the book itself. There's no such thing as 'the book itself.

Karl Ove Knausgård

Never give up! And write for yourself first and foremost.

Aminah Iman

Standing in front of the white picket fence, I stared at the multitude of champagne roses weaving their hunter green vines gracefully through and around the fence. Soft hints of pink hues whispered from the centers of the blooms. Their petals covered the lush ground and rolled in a lazy dance with the warm summer breeze...

Leah Lozano

He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.

Ray Bradbury

dianemoorewriter.comFebruary 11, 2015 · From Love Thy Neighbor" On journalism and news purists as well as why I pursued print instead of TV journalism/news at the No. 1 journalism school in the country: news reporters are willing to take risks "so that people can base their lives on a foundation of truth not lies. That's why I do it -- to be the one responsible voice in the crowd." Page 105' "Love Thy Neighbor

Diane Moore

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise.

Leland Ryken

I asked her what a true story was because I thought that all stories were made up. She said a true story was called fact, and a made-up story was called ficton. Auntie May said a made-up story is a bit like telling lies, only the people who read them knew that already and so it didn’t matter

Rebecca Lloyd

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

Graham Swift

No matter how strong you are, you cannot hold open the jaws of a great-white shark with your bare hands... that can do your brain.

Ivan Stoikov

No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.

Neil Gaiman

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side.

Theodore Roosevelt

Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.

Charlie Brooker

Some things can be fixed. Some things are just too broken.

Susan Vaught

I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out.

Jennifer Donnelly

In fiction, beauty was run-of-the-mill.

Eileen Favorite

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.

Ursula K Le Guin

Literature is the real life of imaginary people.

Stefanos Livos

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

Matt Haig

I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.

Jennifer Donnelly

Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.

Douglas Adams

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad thing. As if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Neil Gaiman

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

Virginia Woolf

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

John Green

If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.

Daphne du Maurier

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Hilary Mantel

This is only a work of fiction , The Truth as always will be far stranger

Arthur C. Clarke

He fell in love with the way she fell in love with everything besides him.

Polkadot

Science is no longer fiction,but Reality may become one.

Natasha Tsakos

There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer's fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case.

Jeanette Winterson

It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.

Jeanette Winterson

We shall take a star out of the skies and shall set thousands of worlds on fire...

Cordwainer Smith

If you act for self-gain then no good can come of it. If you act selflessly, then you act well for all and you must not be afraid.

Rand Miller

Life seemed ideal to him right then, and he was happy for the first time in a long time, and it felt like the sun was shining from his heart." - from the novel Brainjob by David Sloma.

David Sloma

Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.

Michael Crichton

What’s going on?” Ingrid asked. “Listen, nothing bad today, please.” She pulled a chair out and sat down. Faye stared at her and said the words as quickly as she could. “I’m just going to give it to you straight as I can. Mila is a witch.” Ingrid busted out with a laugh. “I wouldn’t call her that,” she said. “That’s a little harsh, isn’t it?” She poured the juice into her glass and took a drink. “What did the brat do this time?” She set her glass down.

Taylor Keys

You’re a talking cat?” Endora asked with a look of disbelief on her face.“My, my, my, aren’t you the bright bulb of the bunch,” he replied with a bit of snarky smugness. “Tell me then, bright-bulb, do you suppose that I need your permission to talk just because I’m a cat?” He raised his paw to his face, admiring his newly gnawed manicure. After he observed the last nail, he slapped his paw down on the floorboards, making a low thud sound. “Because I don’t,” he smirked.Endora was taken by surprise at his rudeness. She stared back at him, speechless and not quite sure how to respond. “Are you a magic cat?” Mila busted in with a question that seemed as silly to her as to the cat.He glared and narrowed his eyes at her. “A magic cat,” he said, standing up to arch his furry back. “Is my talking some sort of magic to you? If it is… then I am.” He stretched his back higher and let out a long purr that turned into, “Purrhaps, you four little witchy girls should clearly refine your meaning of magic so you know what it means before you say the word magic.” “I rather am quite fond of talking cats,” Selena said with a big smile. “Of course, you’re the first one I’ve ever seen.”The cat narrowed its eyes tighter. “Indeed,” he said, letting out a yawn as if the whole conversation were a bore. He leapt off the porch and dash away, mumbling and grumbling his way down the corridor. Selena looked over at Endora. “Rude little snot, isn’t he?” she said.

Sophie Palmer

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Fiction Quotes - Page 41

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