Novel Quotes - Page 9

Merdeka!' the Malay man screamed.'Merdekaaaaaa!' the sea of people echoed.

One of the things about writing that inspires--and impresses me, is the music words can make. And, like music, the spaces between the notes can mean as much as the notes themselves. -- The Jesus Horse

Melinda West Seifert

Presently a soprano voice of richness and depth floated from the open windows of the parlor, resonating over the darkening greenery. All at once it was as if the entire scene before them was awakened by that voice, infused with unexpected life: the western sky, streaked with bands of pale gold and purple; the two houses, standing gray and disconsolate against that sky; the clusters of trees casting deep black shadows here and there across the ground. The same voice that brought everything suddenly to life also drew them into another, much deeper world—a world that was normally hidden, a world that stretched out into eternity. Yusuke, who had at first looked on with a sense of distance as everyone else sat listening, their faces intent on the music, found himself being gradually drawn in as well, forgetting the moment and the place, lending his ear during that unworldly stretch of time as if entranced. No one spoke. The singing could not have lasted ten minutes, but when it ended he found the darkness all at once grew deeper.

Minae Mizumura

We work all our lives to be who we become. And, it's who we become that determines what becomes of us.

Melinda West Seifert

Life really is a story, and every story comes to an end. At the same time, it seems we all leave in the middle of our own stories. It's who we become that gives the story body, form and meaning.

Melinda West Seifert

She's still quite fit at ninety, fit enough to chew her food with her own teeth. Apparently she grew up in a house without a bar of soap, let alone tooth powder. Her family didn't have electricity until she started elementary school, and she'd never seen a train until the tracks of the Koumi line were laid in Saku. It's exactly as if she were born in the Edo period. These days, you only have to drive for five minutes to find a sparkling clean convenience store, with bright lights above shelves stocked with everything you could possibly need. Land that used to be fields of mulberry bushes is now crisscrossed by smooth, wide roads lined with video rental stores and fast food restaurants.I would say O-Hatsu has seen more changes in her lifetime than I have. After all, she lived for most of the century when this country was changing faster than it ever had before. Even so, I have a feeling that the inside of her head has remained much the same as when she was a girl. By "the inside of her head" I mean the way she sees the world around her—the language she uses to make sense of it. In my case, the very way I looked at the world and the words I used to understand it had altogether changed.

Minae Mizumura

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.

Jeanette Winterson

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

Jeanette Winterson

We all have a book in us. The first step is recognising this. Writing it is a whole new journey.

Kathryn Joyce

A poem can't do its work if you only read snippets of it.

John Green

Funny how much we all suffer trying to spare others a bit of pain.

Michael LaRocca

Once I was King of the Titans. Now I need a MedicAlert bracelet and a subscription to the Safe Return program. Can you put out a Silver Alert on a god? I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

Michael LaRocca

I have a question for you. When you were a little boy, is this the man you dreamed of becoming?

Michael LaRocca

Dead. Supposedly Suicide. That's how they'll kill Michael too. Make it look like a suicide or an accident of some sort.

H.C. Deboard

I've learned that the most unbelievable is the most believable.

H.C. Deboard

Schopenhauer wrote that to desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake. He was correct.

Michael LaRocca

At my age, every day that I overcome simple inertia is a victory.

Michael LaRocca

With every fall of the sun and rise of the moon, I can hear it. The Prophecy. It echoes through the halls of time. It is written on the surface of every star. Even the sun and moon cannot withhold the news of the second coming. I hear it. And I fear it.

Brian A. McBride

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?

C.S. Lewis

Sometimes surviving is all you can do

Emilee King

I will not be a victim. I will not think like a victim. I am going to avenge all those little girls. I am going to win.

Carolyn Lee Adams

When he unleashes on her everything falls together. Like a crick in the neck snapped into place, the boy's brain pops and is put right. It is a beautiful undoing, a beautiful becoming. He doesn't stop to think about it when the punches follow her down to the ground. He doesn't stop to notice when she goes still or when the pool of blood under her head pillows out into a great, liquid heart. He doesn't stop until he's pulled off her and he doesn't start to think again until that night, when he's back at home. For hours and hours his brain stays beautifully popped into place.

Carolyn Lee Adams

And what is gossip anyway?Just fragments of sad accounts, maneuvered and mutilated year after year for our sinful pleasure.

Kanza Javed

I don't know. But it takes a special woman to have such a great love - Zhongwen

Asma Nadia

You said my name and my heart went rogue

Zandile

He's made me believe I'm worth love of the liquid kind, you know, the kind that seeps to all my damaged parts.

Zandile

It's absurd how crazy love can make you......but even more absurd how stupid jealousy can make you!

Mirella Muffarotto

I don't put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

What is the nature of life?Life is lines of dominoes falling.One thing leads to another, and then another, just like you'd planned. But suddenly a Domino gets skewed, events change direction, people dig in their heels, and you're faced with a situation that you didn't see coming, you who thought you were so clever.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

She lifts her eyes, and there is Death in the corner, but not like a king with his iron crown, as the epics claimed. Why, it is a giant brush loaded with white paint. It descends upon her with gentle suddenness, obliterating the shape of the world.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

But inside loss there can be gain, too,like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Would you like to come in?" I said. My hands were sweaty. Inside my chest an ocean heaved and crashed and heaved again."I would," he said. I saw his Adam's apple jerk as he swallowed. "Thank you."I was distracted by that thank you. We had moved past the language of formality long ago. It was strange to relearn it with each other.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

All this simply shows us that communalism and terrorism are nothing but opposite sides of the same coin. They keep feeding on each other in a vicious cycle, resulting in a society full of violence, hatred, sorrow and intolerance. Every communal act is used as a justification for mindless acts of terrorism . Similarly , each act of terrorism is used as a justification for such horrible atrocities like genocide and ethnic cleansing. And, it is always the innocent who get killed. This is the sad truth.

Vivek Pereira

Love is the connection between souls synchronized through heart beats. Quote from my upcoming book 'Always Be MINE

Neha Daraad

Pak Karman hugged his wife’s gravestone tightly. “You left without saying farewell!” The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light.

Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

They will try to ascribe a purpose to my death, as though it were a punishment, but don’t you do so, in order that I continue to live in all the shadows of your longing. I will always be in your sleep and your wakefulness. I will be with you praying, propitiating and yearning for you, in sadness, in sorrow, in dismay and in the most profound happiness.

Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

I think, therefore I am. My fingers that caress these rose and frangipani petals are a result of my thoughts. I feel content, tender. I feel entranced, ecstatic and besotted by the fragrance of the flowers and this is because of my thoughts.

Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

What has been his cause for searching the heavens day and night, for testing the limit of his reach hour by hour like a man trapped inside an expanding balloon? The reasons were as various as the days they consumed: to grasp the workings of the universe, to find something more beyond earth’s fretful compass, to put his name to a discovery and secure fame’s immortality, to be able to point to a map and proclaim simply: here I am.

John Pipkin

Her calculations have always held the utmost accuracy, but mathematics alone will not be enough to guide her; she must learn to trust in chance and, if need be, in accident.

John Pipkin

Each new scientific fact gives rise to new uncertainties, and every pattern of starlight holds both a record and a prophecy.

John Pipkin

The heavens are too immense, too beautiful and varied, to fit into the mind of any one deity; the murmured creeds of fathers and sons are no match for the astronomer’s gasp.

John Pipkin

Nothing in heaven or earth is content to be alone, and so there must always be something more. The universe is governed by a principle no more complicated than this: that a solitary body will forever attract another to itself.

John Pipkin

It is one of the great blessings of youth, this guiltlessness, the source of gentle sleep and peaceful days.

John Pipkin

Wisdom tolerates blustered opinions, the better to dismiss them later with discovery.

John Pipkin

It is only the sudden and unpredictable appearance of comets that spoils the immutable celestial sphere.

John Pipkin

The basis of English law is as simple as this: If you would know the future’s shape, look to the past.

John Pipkin

Is this not the very thing that drives an adventurous man to navigate uncharted oceans, to traverse continents and mountains, to pilot virgin estuaries and hidden coves—this promise of inscribing a name steadfast upon what he finds? There are few parcels of earth left to be claimed; yet even as the known world shrinks, the heavens grow ever more infinite. An explorer of the skies need never leave his home or fret over the swiftness of other expeditions; he might give whatever name he chooses to any new thing that wanders into his view.

John Pipkin

But if watching the sky is to be his duty, how should he begin? Now and then he has spotted one of the five bright planets or recognized a constellation, but he knows little about the turning of the heavens. When he contemplates the great distances between this and that, and the vast multitude of solitary objects spread over the celestial dome, he cannot fathom how one goes about searching for what is yet unknown.

John Pipkin

The same ratios that govern music give laws to optics and to the movement of the heavens as well. Simple. Elegant. Predictable.

John Pipkin

...but at night when he turns the awkward [telescope] skyward, he catches his breath at the clarity of the image and the vast populations of stars unknown to him until then, the riotous glittering in the dark crevices between constellations, a convocation of bright spirits waiting to be found.

John Pipkin

Sketches of mad skies spilling stars caught in spiraling gyres, diagrams for constructing sextants tall as a man and armillary spheres to mimic the motion of the cosmos. He decides that he must have all of it, that he will cram the little observatory with maps and charts, clocks and compasses, and instruments for bringing the sky nearer.

John Pipkin

As the eclipse progresses, a confusion of chattering birds sweeps low in search of dusk and their shadows skip over the water’s surface and it makes perfect sense that these small creatures should be so moved by events beyond their reckoning.

John Pipkin

So we will cover every possibility. We will take turns at the telescope. I will keep watch in the day, and at night you will take my place, and together we will see to it that no part of the sky goes unobserved.

John Pipkin

He tracks the rise and fall of the glittering darkness thronged with specks and tendrils of luminous secrets. Falling stars crackle in the cold air and prickle his skin. They flash in the corner of his vision where the eye’s discernment of light and shadow is most acute.

John Pipkin

To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life.

D.H. Lawrence

The quiet brings to mind the multitude of men and women living out their days in solitude—each convinced that their fears and wants are unique to themselves—and she longs to press herself into their fold and be counted among those whose lives are meshed with the turning of the world.

John Pipkin

Here the sky is wrapped in silk. The breathings of so many men and animals, and the smoke of your coal, and the fog, oh, it is too much. The Paris sky is perfect. A man must see clearly, to see something new.

John Pipkin

Sometimes he counts himself to sleep by imagining the miles between stars like the succession of footsteps cleaving him from his home, as if mastering the distance in thought might blunt the separation. But if a man cannot return to the place of his birth, then what is there to stay his restless feet? What center will hold him from wandering endlessly? It should not be so difficult, he thinks, to know one’s place in the order of things.

John Pipkin

Time lost to pointless delay can never be regained. It is the most reprehensible kind of theft. Why was it that men did not grasp this simple fact? Money comes and goes and comes again, and knowledge can be acquired and forgotten and rediscovered, but time once lost is lost for good, each passing second irretrievable.

John Pipkin

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Novel Quotes - Page 9

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