Novel Quotes - Page 4

My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Whenever you are transplanted, like me, you will understand how very delightful it is to meet with anything at all like what one has left behind.

Jane Austen

The novel is... the anti-form proper to modernity itself (which is to say, of capitalism and its cultural and epistemological categories, its daily life). This means... that the novel is also a vehicle of creative destruction. Its function, in some properly capitalist ‘cultural revolution’, is the perpetual undoing of traditional narrative paradigms and their replacement, not by new paradigms, but by something radically different. To use Deleuzian language for a moment, modernity, capitalist modernity, is the moment of passage from codes to axioms, from meaningful sequences, or indeed, if you prefer, from meaning itself, to operational categories, to functions and rules; or, in yet another language, this time more historical and philosophical, it is the transition from metaphysics to epistemologies and pragmatisms, we might even say from content to form.

Fredric Jameson

He downs the contents of his glass in a single gulp and, looking at Simon, adds: “This is as amusing as a novel.

Laurent Binet

Was he shiny and bright and something sucked it out of him? Cecilia thought. But stars are a load of fire, maybe his were flamed out, but could they burn out again? After Cecilia drew him and his empty eyes, she wanted to write those words down, it felt like song lyrics. And she did. Making it in bold letters.

Basma Salem

He found Granny on the porch, asleep. Her chin sat on her chest, rising and falling with her breath. He gathered her up in his arms, light as a girl, and carried her inside to her room. He covered her in her old handed-down quilt. The outer layers were burnished to a luster over decades of sleeping flesh, the inner batting composed of older blankets still. He tucked it under her feet, her elbows and shoulders, and went out into the den and opened the door of the wood stove. A mouth of red coals. He added two lengths of the seasoned white oak they kept stacked on the porch, hot-burning wood for cold nights, and stoked it to a fury before stepping outside.

Taylor Brown

If you were crossing the road and saw a black cat passing, you may possibly get hit by a car, or a mail boy or the sky could rain in summer, possibly snow. Those were theories, none of them were true. It was like karma; it only happens to you if you believed in them. Myths, Cecilia called them. The guy looked frozen. This is silly, she thought. He could not be that affected by the cat. Cecilia had been working here for a year and she wasn’t struck by lightning, she was alive, of course, nobody chose the cat so this is why she was the oldest pet in the store.

Basma Salem

In her past were sweet passages, in her future rosy hopes.

Charlotte Brontë

He did not yet known how many commenced lefe-romances are doomed never to get beyond the first, or at most the second chapter.

Charlotte Brontë

There are empty spaces that must be respected – those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.

Tove Jansson

If you need philosophy and you're waiting on the gas chamber, stick to Socrates. At least he had a sense of humor.

Tyler Patrick Wood

A fugitive on the run with a plan for the future is the definition of hubris.

Tyler Patrick Wood

Paths cross all the time in this world of ours, sometimes in the strangest places- Charles Jacobs

Stephen King

this is very important, so listen carefully. As I told you before, there is no middle ground with me. You take either all of me or nothing. That’s the way it works. If you don’t mind continuing the way we are now, I don’t see why we can’t do that. I don’t know how long we’d be able to, but I’ll do everything in my power to see that it happens. When I’m able to come see you, I will. But when I can’t, I can’t. I can’t just come to see you whenever I feel like it. You may not be satisfied with that arrangement, but if you don’t want me to go away again, you have to take all of me. Everything. All the baggage I carry, everything that clings to me. And I will take all of you. Do you understand that? Do you understand what that means?

Haruki Murakami

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

George Orwell

The problem with love is that there is so much of it to give." King Tommy

Monique Golda Nerman

She closed the distance between them and gave him a tentative hug. He was liberally cologned, with a scent that incited bewildering memories. She circled him, not knowing why. She had only met him a few weeks back, yet tonight, something about him triggered old memories, of a time, a person.tMaybe not.tWhat she did know, he lacked that special ingredient that moved her. Dull as ditch water. He was sufficiently polite, but that was about all she could say. –Michael Benzehabe, from the novel Unassimilated

Michael Benzehabe

This dull, difficult novel I have brought with me on my trip—I keep trying to read it. I have gone back to it so many times, each time dreading it and each time finding it no better than the last time, that by now it has become something of an old friend. My old friend the bad novel.

Lydia Davis

I was told, and indeed I saw several examples, that neither time nor place was much minded, and that I might hazard being equally careless of chronology and geography; but I piqued myself on having studied Aristotle, and scrupulously attended to the probabilities of time and place.

Charlotte Turner Smith

A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.

Colum McCann

You know what feels really fucking awesome? Loving someone so much that it's all consuming. Telling that person you love them, even though they refuse to say it back. And then finally hearing them say that they do love you, but to someone else. To someone they have slept with. Someone that isn't you. I want to forget I heard those three words. I want to dissolve the images I have in my heard of her with him. I think I'm going to throw up.

Steph Campbell

Why else do we write and write except to move our readers?

Jerome Charyn

Suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others.

José Luís Peixoto

When the evening was over, Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme, to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.

Jane Austen

He looks out the window at the falling snow, then turns and takes his wife in his arms, feeling grateful to be here even as he wonders what he is going to do with his life in strictly practical terms. For years he had trained himself to do one thing, and he did it well, but he doesn't know whether he wants to keep doing it for the rest of his life, for that matter, whether anyone will let him. He is still worrying when they go to bed.Feeling his wife's head nesting in the pillow below his shoulder, he is almost certain that they will find ways to manage. They've been learning to get by with less, and they'll keep learning. It seems to him as if they're taking a course in loss lately. And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours: knowing that whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future, they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past, memory itself finally flickering and growing treacherous toward the end; knowing that even the children who may be in their future will eventually school them in the pain of growth and separation, as their own parents and mentors die off and leave them alone in the world, shivering at the dark threshold.

Jay McInerney

Talking about ideas for a novel is a bit like showing pictures of the ultrasound if you're pregnant. Until they're out in the world, they can only be wonderful to you.

Clare Boylan

No matter how much restitution she paid with every word and deed, her blood-stained hands could never really be clean, even if no one else knew they were dirty.

Stacy Hawkins Adams

Anne did think on the question with perfect decision, and said as much in replay as her own feelings could accomplish, or as his seemed able to bear, for he was too much affected to renew the subject - and when he spoke again, it was something totally different.

Jane Austen

History immortalises both the names of the greats and the tyrants without making a distinction between them.

Aziz Hamza

The sweet-smelling aroma of the island spices still hung in the air. It filled his nostrils and titillated his appetite all over again. His appetite drove him mad for something much more than food.

Luke A.M. Brown

The men were smashing windows and aiming their weapons through them. The driver had opened the door and was shouting for the women and children to get out and run and hide. But Ilina realized in some vague way that he never managed to actually say the word "hide." He really said, "Women and children, get out, get out, get out! Run and..." The clerk's wife thought it was odd that he had stopped in the middle of a sentence, and even stranger that she herself knew the word, heard the word "hide" in her head when the driver stopped talking.

Clark Zlotchew

That's the way life takes us,' Elleke once said. 'It takes us like this, then it turns us over and takes us like that.' What she didn't say was that through it all we manage to cling to something that makes sense.

Abdulrazak Gurnah

...and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candour of the satanically fallen. ~ The French Lieutenant’s Woman

John Fowles

Pfft, aren’t you optimistic,” my mouth twists into an ugly grimace as I clench my fists. My throat dries from the rushed breathing as my vision blurs, tears drying, my blood pounds in my ears. “Thinking as if this shit storm will ever blow over. Everyone’s got their scars and stories. This is yours.”Though I’ll always be haunted, memories always resurface.

Jocelyn White

The great novels are deterrents. A Merck's manual on how not to live.

Marty Rubin

Once we were inside the walls of Rahway Prison the mood changed. We were patted down for weapons and given a tour. They showed us how to make improvised weapons that people would hide in their ass. The guards pointed out the young guys who had become someone’s bitch.”Excerpt From: Life of a Bastard Vol. 1 By Damien Black

Damien Black

Whatever’s eating at you, let it go. Emotion leads to poor decisions. Poor decisions lead to scrutiny. Scrutiny is our greatest threat.

Ken Cruickshank

Whatever’s eating at you, let it go. Emotion leads to poor decisions. Poor decisions lead to scrutiny. Scrutiny is our greatest threat.”The Barn

Ken Cruickshank

For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That - that is the raison d'être of the art of the novel.

Milan Kundera

I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.

Mario Puzo

How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.

Don DeLillo

Yet losing him seemed unbearable. He was the one she loved, the one she would always love, and as he leaned in to kiss her, she gave herself over to him. While he held her close, she ran her hands over his shoulders and back, feeling the strength in his arms. She knew he’d wanted more in their relationship than she’d been willing to offer, but here and now, she suddenly knew she had no other choice. There was only this moment, and it was theirs.

Nicholas Sparks

Be quick, but don't hurry.

John Wooden

Mum used to say we were the same soul split in two and walking around on four legs. It seems unnatural being born together and then dying apart.

Melodie Ramone

You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die.And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.

Anne Rice

There’s something so great about this,” she whispers. About what?” I whisper back.About this,” she whispers. About being outlaws. It’s just you and me—against the world.

Sonya Sones

I could not have asked for a better friends or a better life, but there’s a nasty trick about living. It happens at its own pace and in its own way and you never, never know what’s coming next. So you keep running and running to keep up with it and most people get tired. Others don’t get tired. They just get overtaken by the road.

Melodie Ramone

She couldn’t read his expression. As he started toward her, she recalled the way he’d seemed to glide through the sand the first time she’d ever seen him; she remembered their kiss on the boat dock the night of his sister’s wedding. And she heard again the words she’d said to him on the day they’d said good-bye. She was besieged by a storm of conflicting emotions—desire, regret, longing, fear, grief, love. There was so much to say, yet what could they really begin to say in this awkward setting and with so much time already passed?

Nicholas Sparks

It was disconcerting that being in love felt lonelier than lonelines.

Emily Maguire

He who spends too long regretting his ruined crop will be neglect to plant next year's harvest.

François Lelord

It began with a perfect plan. Shape-wise we had a circle, a simple uncomplicated curve to guide us comfortably from one thing to another, an easy predictable ride promising a natural progression from A to B, C and D, and so on until we reached our destination. But somewhere down that smooth line, I think around F, it all went pear-shaped.

Ivana Hruba

And they...LIVED! Life isn't always ‘Happily Ever After’, rather, loving FOREVER, regardless.

Carmen DeSousa

A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

Milan Kundera

I think: perhaps the sky is a huge sea of fresh water and we, instead of walking under it, walk on top of it; perhaps we see everything upside down and the earth is a kind of sky, so that when we die, when we die, we fall and sink into the sky.

José Luís Peixoto

When you're younger you're so happy to get some good loving you convince yourself you're in love, can't live with out it, and chase the dick like a crack addict after the pipe, or chase the bad sex hoping something happened to the man over night and the next time it'll be good.

Jill Nelson

Then he smiles because he knows deep in his bones that his dad has gone and said something really funny probably. He kicks off his sheet and slides his feet into his slippers. Bunny sits in the living room, slumped low on the sofa, full of Geoffrey's Scotch and Poodle's cocaine.

Nick Cave

Writing consist of everything. whether your writing is of riddles, rimes, prose, trivial, general, of thought, or of feeling. indiscretions you've done or have fantasized about. love, deception, romance, fear, death, life, pain, & yes even happiness. writing is of a specific purpose & states a meaning within what is written.

Michael Stuckey

Inspiration doesn't always come in chronological order.

Gina Marinello-Sweeney

Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher?No. You can’t trade what is for what might have been.

Lurlene McDaniel

When you get everything you wanted, I think maybe you do have to be a little grateful for the people who got you there.. whether or not they thought they were doing you any favors at the time.

Jennifer Weiner

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Novel Quotes - Page 4

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