Literary Fiction Quotes

If loving the written word is wrong...I don't want to be right!

Junnita Jackson

It was a sacrifice worthy of her and dreams are made to be killed.

He looked along the line of children, exhibits A to C of his existence and heirs to the twisted throne of his corrupt genetics.

So you’re the little smart ass from Poleglass.”I wanted to point out he sounded like Dr. Seuss but bit my lip and remembered the warning the old lady gave me.

He was a shadow of the man that once intimidated us out of our home, a shell of a human being, a fragment of a father.

There exists an oasis where inspiration bursts forth like black gold from the fertile loam and every odd bellbird chirps a melody worth remembering. There’s no bloody map or nautical chart that can deliver you there, but you know the instant you’ve arrived because you never ever want to depart.

Adam G. Tarsitano

I left Hairball to his manic mantric singing. I walked toward the house and stopped to rub some white pine needles on my fingers. The evergreen smelled fresh and alive. The needles were long and soft to the touch. I looked back at Hairball. The moon had risen higher and Little Meadow was even brighter. The windpicked up Hairball’s singing and blew it away. By the time I got up to the house he had become a silvery ghost dancing in the moonlight, a nowhere man longing to live on the moon.

Scott Lax

What had those vile creatures unleashed in me? What beast had they awakened? I think I vowed to kill the beast and bury it so deep in the abyss it would never again rear its ugly head. Part of me did make this promise. The other part embraced an unfolding of life’s inextinguishable flames and the mind’s unspoken bondage.As far as reinforcing the strength of my mind’s resolve, I supposed my body was a useless entity. Rather, it was this fancy thing I lived in—a mausoleum that beckoned the living, promising gratification, refuge, solace, peace, even immortality. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t mine. I realized then, it had never belonged to me. I could control what happened to it only if people were merciful. Watching Valentin was not merciful. It was a torturous joy.

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know.

Short story collections are the literary equivalent of canapés, tapas and mezze in the world of gastronomy: Delightful assortments of tasty morsels to whet the reader's appetite.

I’m looking for the exit.”“The Last Exit to Brooklyn, will it be?”“Er, no! Just the way out.”From "One man in his time

Anthony J. Saunders

She let her mind drift, thinking about new lingerie designs, wishing she'd brought along her sketchpad. Inspiration could strike at the most inconvenient times--in the shower, in the car, on this road--but she was grateful it was with her again, an old companion with whom she was getting reacquainted, pleased to find they could take up where they'd left off, as if there'd been no estrangement at all.

Heather Barbieri

There are ultimate truths you cannot hide from no matter how high you climb or how long you sit alone. Everything is on its way somewhere, even if that place feels like nowhere.

Don't ever let anyone tell you that things can't be changed, that things can't be done. The can and they will, if we are united in what we believe.

The sublime beauty was almost hidden withing the castle walls. She believed that the treasured things in life were often hard to find - a pearl in an oyster shell, a kind word in the heat of the moment.

As people's hopes soared, Jana felt a tinge of fear.

He nodded, looking across the room at the sea of photographers and journalists. The microphones spread around him like birds waiting to be fed.

Mr Martinek turned back to Jana. 'Thirty-eight per cent alcohol, sixty-two per cent fire - all the way from Karlovy Vary.

As the sun lowered into the city's skyline, casting an orange glow over the islands, Jana could feel people's hopes rising.

9 November 1989. A day nobody would forget. She had heard rumours about the wall.

I don't know, Benes. I'm not sure I've ever really understood women for that kind of commitment.' He flipped his beer mat up int the air with his index finger and caught it in his hand.

To Jana's mind everybody seemed happy to see BAbichka and resisted returning her, like a misplaced package sent to the wrong address. It was as if the recipient opened it up, knowing it should be returned, but wondering who long they could legitimately keep it before being changed with theft.

The others moved in like a wake of vultures, ready to devour their prey. she had seen it on television once. 'Scavengers,' Tatinek called them. They swoop in and feed off the carcasses of animals that are too weak to escape - lots of them on battlefields. This looked the same, only the victim wasn't there, just his writing, his typewriter, and bits of dark paper.

One word was the method by which the state collected their information. They could reel in the informants and spread them out like tentacles, ready to sting in any direction.

And I tell her about his description because I want her to know what I now know, which is that the place where the pepper grows is not a place to be afraid of…I tell her: Mama, exile is not always the darkest corner of the earth. Sometimes it is lush and plentiful, sometimes it is full of life…

The lines in the corners of her eyes spoke of years of wisdom, as a tree with the number of rings increasing with each passing year. She was a small frame of a woman with piercing eyes that suggested that they knew you, understood you even.

In any case how many took the oath and are now licking the toes of the whiteman?No, you take an oath to confirm a choice already made. The decision to lay or not lay your life for the people lies in the heart. The oath is the water sprinkled on a man's head at baptism

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Largely, now, it was not anger he felt, but rather a kind of bone-scraping, quiet, ever-present sorrow. To come to the place that was supposed to stay the same, to come and find it changed. Dr. Miller had warned him against what he called the 'geographic cure.' You can't fix yourself by going somewhere else, he'd said. You'll always take yourself along.

Elizabeth Graver

Her entire life, she’d been told sin was wrong, a black and white interpretation of what is evil and what is holy in the world—colored like a priest’s robe and collar—but she never believed it to be true. Sin was colorful: scarlet like rose blood, azure like skin deprived oxygen, violet as bruises, jade as rot; a colorful contradiction to the darkness and blinding light all are taught sin and holiness to be.

Tastes change, Cherie. I find the older I get the more I like to be reminded of my youth.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

War’s all either country knows, and everything seems to depend on it now.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

I offer you your life, friend, and recommend you take it.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

You’ll likely always have some reason or other to hang onto that girl. You just want her cause she was married to your son, and I understand that, he was a friend to me like a brother, near the only family I ever knew, and I miss him almost as much as you. But I need me a woman.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

It's no such thing! she said. It's friendship! And if you're a man who can't tell friendship from charity, then you're to be pitied!

Bette Lee Crosby

Church words are easy to say, but they're not so easy to live by.

Bette Lee Crosby

As sorry as I feel for myself, I feel even sorrier for her. I know she's afraid of staying and equally as frightened of going. Just as this land is a part of me, this house is a part of her. Selling off these things piece by piece is like cutting away chunks of her heart. I promised to make it better, but only God knows whether or not that's a promise I'll be able to keep.

Bette Lee Crosby

Cyrus is the meat and potatoes of my life, but Prudence was a cupcake I could enjoy just for the sheer sweetness of being with her.

Bette Lee Crosby

He searched his mind for something more to say, something to take away her pain, but he could find nothing. There were no words to ease such a pain. He knew because the ache in his heart was as great as hers.

Bette Lee Crosby

Here's to the future, he said and lifted the glass to his mouth. There was a lump of regret stuck in his throat as he spoke the words, but he washed it down with the whiskey.

Bette Lee Crosby

As I grow ever closer to the end of my time, I look back at this life and tell you that the only thing I would wish to give up is the regret I've carried in my heart for all these years. At long last I have come to realize the things I once counted as regrets were indeed blessings that I was too blind to see.

Bette Lee Crosby

Holding the bread to her chest, she made her way home, thinking of those dreamy winter afternoons, when the light looked as it did now, the crystalline blue of the sky slipping into a faded purple, as faint as a bruise.

Over the years Breece had lectured that truth was liquid. That it evaporated in the heat of passion, froze in the cold of fear, and bent itself around virginous, unpurposeful fibs. It could churn and pull you under, drown you in itself, or let you ride upon it like a surf. But truth was always relfective. It showed blackheads and blemishes, fat rolls and sags, scabs and scars. Truth was fearful, angry and dangerous, and that was why so many people did their utmost to avoid it.

Mom rubbed the back of my neck and we kept walking, away from the kids and the colors and the high-pitched, happy voices. Seeing them made me feel like I was a million miles from anything good. I just got really lonely. I'm not sure why. All those kids smiling and laughing and my mom so fucking clueless and me feeling kinda shitty and high at the same time. All of a sudden, I couldn't figure out what the point was. I couldn't remember what mattered.

Amy Sargent Swank

Last night I dreamt Moses and I were rowing underwater.We could breathe and talk to one another.We rowed past schools of fish and sea anemones and Moses named them for me.”—Jules Finn

Elsa's mother no longer spoke to her of men and love, but of duty and fate and accepting one’s burden. As far as Elsa could tell, if love really was the inherited female domain, then women were saddled with the biggest burden of all. It was pressing down upon them, the way the sea pressed down upon the creatures of the deep.

Kathy-Diane Leveille

It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little. In his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that, to them, servants are invisible.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

It took me most of my childhood to realize that traditions have infinite power over us.-MUKTA

I wonder if every girl yearns for her father’s love,almost like waiting to catch the moon hiding in the trees—beautiful, yet so eternally elusive.-MUKTA

Sifting through scattered memories is like sifting through sand. Some remain, some simply slipaway…– TARA

I guess if you get too close, the twinkling stops; they don’t look like stars anymore.

You know what people are doing on the other side of the world, what’s happening on another planet, but not what’s going on inside the person next to you.

Were the stars against him? A woman's fingers are quicker in the sky and shine more brightly.

We put our flags in soil when we arrive, as if it now belongs to us and we know where we are.

The world is indeed a cold, hard stone.

A nose is ordinarily naked. A nose isn’t nipple, although there are similarities.

The emotion was the most important thing.

Some people say he engineered his own arrest to gain an insight into modern methods of policing for a thriller he had planned. But you know what happens to artistic rats in prison: they have their rectums stretched, and not by overindulgence in Michelin-star food; they have their columns examined, and not by internet humorists or a qualified medical practitioner. I’m sure Rat knew this, too. Although he likes to accumulate a wide general knowledge, he would rather have a narrow rectum. A colon comes in handy here, before examples: two dots on top of one other, like the cowboys who copulate on Brokeback Mountain, on a slope so far away you need binoculars to see them properly. In prison there are too many insights and examples. Rat would never risk it.

Olga was better, in the sun, where he could see every pore in her skin. Get closer. Feel her next to him. It was all he wanted in the world. It was the last thing in the world that he could do.

The sexual contact before this?“It was the first time.”The woman looked at Rat again, harder. The silence was more painful than the words. What she had just heard went beyond plain immorality. It was ridiculous.

1 2 3 Next