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Quotes by Novelist
"Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread."
36
"To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms -- some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh."
36
"Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand."
36
"Autumn was her happiest season. There was an expectancy about its sounds and shapes: the distant thunk pomp of leather and young bodies on the practice field near her house made her think of bands and cold Coca-Colas, parched peanuts and the sight of people's breath in the air. There was even something to look forward to when school started - renewals of old feuds and friendships, weeks of learning again what one half forgot in the long summer. Fall was hot-supper time with everything to eat one missed in the morning when too sleepy to enjoy it."
36
"She who is even once unjust can not complain if the like is expected of her again."
36
"I try as best I can to enter the realm of nuances of human behavior."
36
"The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense."
36
"This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art."
36
"And we mustn't lose our sense of humor," Mrs. Which said. "The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly."
36
"Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs."
36
"I'm my characters' galley slave."
36
"Your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary."
36
"When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules."
36
"Be that as it may, I think someday you'll meet a man worth giving up your independence for."
36
"It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away."
36
"There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don't believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it--and almost all of us have one way or another--this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish."
36
"It will make you powerful. But it will also make you weak. Your prowess in combat will be beyond any mortal's, but your weaknesses, your failings will increase as well."You mean I'll have a bad heel?" I said. "Couldn't I just, like, wear something besides sandals? No offense."
36
"He was mad and plenty brave."
36
"Maybe she was a wallflower. There was no shame in that. Especially not if one enjoyed being a wallflower."
36
"I'm pretty well. So's the family, and so's the boys, except for a sort of rash as is a running through the school, and rather puts 'em off their feed. But it's a ill wind as blows no good to nobody; that's what I always say when them lads has a wisitation. A wisitation, sir, is the lot of mortality. Mortality itself, sir, is a wisitation. The world is chock full of wisitations; and if a boy repines at a wisitation and makes you uncomfortable with his noise, he must have his head punched. That's going according to the Scripter, that is."
36
"People ask without wanting to know."
36
"I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean."
36
"People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design, there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own."
36
"Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp."
36
"He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him."
36
"I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me."
36
"We'll start to forget a place once we left it."
36
"There are six reasons anyone does anything: Love. Faith. Greed. Boredom. Fear...' he said, ticking them off on his fingers; but he lingered on the last, drawing a deep breath before he said, 'Revenge."
36
"And no wonder; for the new technique of "subliminal projection," as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings massed entertainment now plays a part comparable to that played in the Middle Ages be religion."
36
"Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes."
36
"Whatever it was, she knew she would not be blamed for it, she was blameless. But what use had that been to her in the past, to be blameless? So at the same time she felt guilty, and as if she was about to be punished."
36
"Work from your own side of literature/ & room fetish, not "publishing's"."
36
"I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some thins you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still here. If a house burns down, it's done, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or know, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened."
36
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