Fiction Quotes - Page 7

I went to say no, but I winced as I pulled my tooth out of my lip.I was absolutely hopeless. In a two minute period my front curls hadstarted to go straight due to my constant brushing them behind my earsand I was pretty sure my lip was bleeding. Frustrated I pushed myself off ofthe couch with a huff and walked around the glass coffee table to head forthe kitchen.“I've made you angry.”“No.”Darren got up and cut me off in the middle of the room. “Yes, I did.You're angry with me.”“No, not with you.”“Then what's wrong?”“I'm angry with myself.

You’ll be civilized or we’ll leave your arse here.” Johan... "Vital Perception

Look, I went to a lot of trouble to come here and try to help you. I’m in more trouble than I can guess, but if you don’t want my help… maybe I should have just stayed home.

The morning was brisk and the coffee was hot and roasted with little gurgles in the room. Rosie hadn’t moved, but she let out a tiny snore every now and again that made everything perfect.

Ruth McLeod-Kearns

Like I’ve told you before, Beverly, I don’t care where we live as long as we’re together.” Vance... "The Elder Effect

I also had a father, who had loved for a long time without being nearby. How many others were walking around and not even knowing that someone far away cared for them? Imagine all that love floating in the air, waiting to land on someone's life.

Pam Muñoz Ryan

In life your rewards come from the gifts you give to others.

We were like wanderers in a desert, blessed with a rare downpour, but unable to store the rain.

Karen Thompson Walker

I did the only thing I could. I said the dumbest thing any man has ever said to a woman, “Yeah, it’s just me and my trash can here,” as I patted its lid and started pushing it up the driveway.

Life is a bowl of cherries just make sure you spit out the pits

Dawson C. Walton

We’re going to make a tunnel for that ship. We’re going to make sure that little lady has every chance in the world to survive. If I get any trouble out of any of ya…” he paused. “I’ll handle it myself, do you understand?” Johan… “Vital Perception

He pressed bravely ahead with his story, the outlines and preliminary versions of which by now filled two thick notebooks, reorganizing, redrafting, and obsessively re-polishing lines and paragraphs with a jeweler's precision.But it was not good enough.He wanted the pages to sing with ideas that had once seemed so important to him, all and everything he knew, and yet they did not, and no amount of diligence was able to bring them to life. The story came to be a burden and weighed more heavily in his hands each time he lifted it out of the drawer. After a few weeks he was reluctant to open the desk at all.("Talking In The Dark")

Dennis Etchison

When he wasn’t busy chasing unseen mice around the academy, Ion spent hours in the Borean Study, searching through dusty books for anything that had to do with the banshee or the Shroud. But finding this anything proved to be difficult as well, especially when the books you’re reading have everything to do with something, but certainly nothing to do with your anything. And in trying to find this anything, Ion forgot about a very important, specific thing, which would quickly ruin his Wednesday.

I recalled something I’d read a long time ago about Satan. When he appeared, it wouldn’t be as a demon but as an ordinary-looking guy with a convincing message of peace.

Humph! A text message that said, ‘What’s up, sexy?’ You call that setting a mood? Love making takes place long before the bedroom—

Do try The House by fresh new author, Susannah Mansfield, it's funny, sad and very different, you'll love the characters and the stories.

Susannah Mansfield

I never look at a painting and ask, "Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?" It's just a painting.

Scott McClanahan

Our first kiss was there on the bridge in the woods. How do you describe a first kiss? It is like trying to hold water in your hands. There is an ancient Chinese proverb that compares kissing to drinking salted water. “You drink, and your thirst increases,” it says. Time, I’m sure, passed by, but we remained unavailable for comment.

Kirstie Collins Brote

When reading dies, the imagination soon follows.

Ronnie Ray Jenkins

No,” I said. “I can’t remember doing this.”“Oh,” Rena made and gestured dramatically. “You don’t remember it. And that automatically means you didn’t do it?

Good fantasy fiction: ... explores real human conditions through fantastic metaphors which universalize the characters' individual experiences to speak personally to us all.

It was like walking into another world. While the mansion was bright, warm, comfy and filled with sound and color, the outside was dark, cold, colorless and devoid of people.I found myself standing beside Thomas in the street. The paved road felt so cold it was hurting my feet. I kept moving them up and down, afraid my skin would freeze to the pavement. My heart was racing already and I felt a bit out of breath. If we stood there much longer i was going to hyperventilate.

Can you imagine how many people got laid in here?" Abby said, walking to the other side of the Jacuzzi.

That's what scares me the most, Paul. That I'll just pass through life and all the people I know will just disappear, without a trace, without me ever telling them how much they mean to me, no matter how small the time spent was or how great the friendship was. That they'll be gone and they'll forget me and I'll end up with nothing."I saw in my head Charley laughing, Charley sticking his head out the window and screaming, Charley playing a video game so intensely he was a foot from the screen. Moments flashed before my eyes in a quick, unrelenting sequence. I shook my head. "I know. Believe me, I know.

You are the belle of the ball tonight.” He said as he moved in closer. “How can you be so sinfully beautiful Mrs. Norman?

Thomas tilted his head towards me. "Don't mind him, he's drunk.""Does he work for you?" I asked him. "Who, Rick? No no no. Really though, he's a fine gentleman, if you speak to him while you're heavily intoxicated. You have to be brought down to HIS level of intelligence in order to properly communicate with him, you see." Thomas said.

Since truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction needs to be pretty weird.

What’s broken is broken—and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live…I’m too old to believe in such sentimentalities as clean slates and starting all over.

Margaret Mitchell

Nothing exists except through human consciousness

The only way to build a fan base is to have a lot of material out there for readers to find. You can't manufacture a fan base. You create it, one story at a time.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

In the forest you may find yourself lost, without companions. You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose sight of your quarry, and forget why you are there. You may meet a dwarf, or the living Christ, or an old enemy of yours; or a new enemy, one you do not know until you see his face appear between the rustling leaves, and see the glint of his dagger. You may find a woman asleep in a bower of leaves. For a moment, before you don’t recognise her, you will think she is someone you know.

Its magnificence was indescribable, and its magnitude was inconceivable. She felt overwhelmed in the presence of its greatness. Pg 87

For years I’d been awaiting that overriding urge I’d always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless women ineluctably to strangers’ strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the hormonal imperative, to wake one day and throw my arms around your neck, reach down for you, and pray that while that black flower bloomed behind my eyes you had just left me with child. (With child: There’s a lovely warm sound to that expression, an archaic but tender acknowledgement that for nine months you have company wherever you go. Pregnant, by contrast, is heavy and bulging and always sounds to my ear like bad news: “I’m pregnant.” I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table- pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend- forcing herself to blurt out her mother’s deepest fear.) (27)

Confession is good for the soul even after the soul has been claimed” (p. 381).

Why are you perpetuating a childhood you grew up despising? Pg 57

You know that euphemism, she’s expecting? It’s apt. The birth of a baby, so long as it’s healthy, is something to look forward to. It’s a good thing, a big, good, huge event. And from thereon in, every good things, too,” I added hurriedly, “but also, you know, first steps, first dates, first places in sack races. Kids, they graduate, they marry, they have kids themselves- in a way, you get to do everything twice. Even if our kid had problems,” I supposed idiotically, “at least they wouldn’t be our same old problems... ” (22)

Franklin, I was absolutely terrified of having a child. Before I got pregnant, my visions of child rearing- reading stories about cabooses with smiley faces at bedtime, feeding glop into slack mouths- all seemed like pictures of someone else. I dreaded confrontation with what could prove a closed, stony nature, my own selfishness and lack of generosity, the thick tarry powers of my own resentment. However intrigued by a “turn of the page,” I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story. And I believe that this terror is precisely what must have snagged me, the way a ledge will tempt one to jump off. The very surmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness , was in the end what attracted me to it. (32)

Miniture protoplasm, the dirty little bastard!

Richard Matheson

I was somewhere between angry and turned-on.

I don’t want to look. I’ve got to look.” Vance... "Vital Perception

I touched his face. "Look," I said. "I love you more than everything else in the world combined. Isn't that enough?" "Yes, it is enough," he answered, smiling. "Enough for forever.

Stephenie Meyer

Everybody is equally weak on the inside, just that some present their ruins as new castles and become kings –

The writer's characters must stand before us with a wonderful clarity, such continuous clarity that nothing they do strikes us as improbable behavior for just that character, even when the character's action is, as sometimes happens, something that came as a surprise to the writer himself. We must understand, and the writer before us must understand, more than we know about the character; otherwise neither the writer nor the reader after him could feel confident of the character's behavior when the character acts freely.

I thought if only we could go onand meet again, shy as strangers.

Strength and victory... What he would never praise himself for, but whose loss was his most obsessive fear.

Why are you so anxious to destroy in the name of a vulgar, commonplace sense of truth, this reality which comes to birth attracted and formed by the magic of the stage itself, which has indeed more right to live here than you, since it is much truer than you -- if you don't mind my saying so?

Luigi Pirandello

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

Christopher Fry

The difference between nonfiction and fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

Shocked my old friend from China, Deja Vu, when I turned up at his door without notice.

I came to the party with the sole purpose of getting completely shit-faced, to be perfectly honest. That was it, that was The Plan from the very beginning. I wanted more than anything that ever regrettable, forgetting-everything-you-learned-as-a-toddler kind of wasted that only either the completely stupid venture into or the complete novice (given how naive I was I think I fall more into the latter category). It was a very simple plan, but I like to think the simplest ones tend to be the most effective. The Plan sure as hell didn't involve everything else that happened that night, as all of that occurred quite naturally on its own.

How long has it been since I entered this blackness? Has it been days, months, or years? I’m stuck here with my mind, my thoughts, my memories, and my nightmares.

That was a stupid idea I made up while drunk. Why did someone build that?

I write fiction not for my readers and not for myself. I write fiction for the sake of those odd heroic characters that are contained therein. They are counting on me as much as I am counting on them.

Nicholas Trandahl

She opened her eyes and looked into his rather intensely. "What?" Alex asked. "This cannot be." "What can't be?" Alex asked her, more bafflement in his voice this time. "I have been reading people all my life. I can even read cats and dogs. I've been doing it all my life and i've been here longer than the two of you put together." "And?" Alex wanted to get to the point. Whatever the truth may be, he just wanted to hear it, wanted it on the table before them so he could get this over with and they can go home. "AND.....you are the first person that has nothing for me to see." "And here I was hoping you'd say I'd win the lottery or get married to a supermodel or something." Alex said, starting to laugh. "You don't understand. I don't see anything, anything at all. There is nothing to you, nothing but what I see before me." "So....what does that mean?" "It means you don't exist.

As the sun went down outside, the television screen started completely lighting up the room in obnoxiously bright colors at hyperactive speeds. The conversation had been slowly rising in volume and frequency, as everyone started becoming more delinquent and the social boundaries slowly wore away. I don't remember what any of them said because I wasn't honestly paying any attention. I was focusing on my own misery and trying to numb the inner demons, the ugly things Thomas claimed came from the Outside World. Yet, to me, it wasn't outside, but rather INSIDE, as in my own head. I kept hearing Charley's voice from bits and pieces of conversations we had, laughter that I'll never hear ever again.

I feel like these characters, these places, these beings and plots, and even these inanimate objects are counting on me for survival. It’s my responsibility to reveal them to the world, to show my readers the names of these things, to show them their histories and stories.

Nicholas Trandahl

As in the universe every atom has an effect, however minuscule, on every other atom, so that to pinch the fabric of Time and Space at any point is to shake the whole length and breadth of it, so in fiction every element has effect on every other, so that to change a character's name from Jane to Cynthia is to make the fictional ground shudder under her feet.

Or you just might say that destiny finally caught up with me.

As Time Goes By

For his lunch break, Alex decided to sit outside for a smoke. There was no break room to speak of, just a backdoor that led to a neglected parking lot and an old payphone. There was an upturned crate by the door used to hold the door open or to sit on if one so desired. But Alex couldn't sit down, even though he had been standing for the past four hours, his anxious mind kept his feet moving.He paced back and forth, smoking his cigarette with the speed of an anxious drug addict. The cool but faint breeze pushed the smoke away from him and dissipated it into nothing. He still felt angry about the run-in with Gonzalez. It had consistently poked at him like a curious sadist with a pointed stick ever since he walked away from the door slammed in his face.

Danilo's was the kind of place where many drinking men come to hide, be it from their wives, in-laws, their jobs or life in general. it was where men and women can come to drink poison as if it was the only form of medicine available to remedy the migraine headache called life. The lighting dim and secluded, mostly covering the tables, counters and the door to the bathroom. The walls were decorated in decades of memories, favorite sports teams and other miscellaneous decor that was typical of small bars such as this one. It was too dark to tell what they were from a distance. There was a thick layer of smoke hovering in the air around the ceiling lights, the place was smothered in it but was strongest above everyone's heads. The smell was the classic stale bar odor of cigarettes and cheap cigars.

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