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Quotes by Novelist
"You always get more respect when you don't have a happy ending."
36
"Her heart - like every heart, if only its fallen sides were cleared away - was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved everything she saw."
36
"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
36
"The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews."
36
"Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a great noise about himself, talking about the stars, disturbing the blades of grass?"
36
"After that, he drank all the rest of the sherry, and Mr. Hubble drank the port, and the two talked (which I have since observed to be customary in such cases) as if they were of quite another race from the deceased, and were notoriously immortal."
36
"Physical comfort has nothing to do with any other comfort."
36
"Some people think that all the equipment you need to discuss religion is a mouth."
36
"Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself! And terrifying that the terms of love are so rigorous, its checks and liberties so tightly bound together. Their relationship depended on her restraint. The premise of their affair, or the basis of their comedy, was that they were two independent people, who needed each other for a time, who would always be friends, but who, probably, would not always be lovers. Such a premise forbids the intrusion of the future, or too vivid an exhibition of need."
36
"THE WOMAN WAS GOING TO KILL HIM, and not because she was stronger and more vicious than he was. Which, if he thought about it, she was. He'd never ripped a man's throat out with his teeth, and he was damned impressed that Gwen had. She'd made the Lords of the Underworld look like marshmallows."
36
"I couldn't believe it had taken me all these years to see this side of him. He tucked himself inside a shell, shutting himself away from others here because the palace had trapped him. Behind the books and the snippy remarks there was a curious, engaging, and sometimes very charming person."
36
"Come what will, one comfort's always left - that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated."
36
"I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things, the word about being."
36
"Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything."
36
"After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones."
36
"Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself."
36
"They reached the summit of a shallow incline and were greeted with a surprising vista of bluebells that blanketed the forest floor. It was like stumbling into a dream, the cerulean haze seeping between the trunks of oak and beech and ash. The smell of bluebells was everywhere, the perfumed air feeling heavy and rich in her lungs.Pausing by a slender tree trunk, Annabelle curled her arm around it loosely and stared at the stands of bluebells with surprised pleasure. "Lovely," she murmured, her face gleaming in the shadow cast by the canopy of ancient, interlaced branches."Yes." But Hunt was looking at her, not the bluebells, and one glance at his expression caused the blood to tingle in her veins."
36
"I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings."
36
"Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor."
36
"But chance has a taste for conspiracy."
36
"She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life."
36
"If you like the lovable sound of an asthma attack in your ear every time you tell a joke."
36
"The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry 'Monster!' and looked behind him."
36
"This sense of my own weakness and emptiness comforts me. I feel myself a mere speck of dust lost in space, yet I am part of that endless grandeur which envelopes me. I could never see why that should be cause for despair, since there could very well be nothing at all behind the black curtain."
36
"Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting."
36
"Don't be intimidated by other people's opinions. Only mediocrity is sure of itself, so take risks and do what you really want to do."
36
"It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers."
36
"Man needs to choose, not just accept his destiny."
36
"I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference."
36
"But that's why you're upset now. Fiction is not life.''You don't believe that.''I think I do.''You know as well as I do that the line can't be drawn, that we're infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it's inescapable.''Don't be a sophist,' he said. 'There is a world and it's palpable.''I don't mean that,' I said. 'I mean that it's hard really to see it, that it's all hazy with out dreams and fantasies."
36
"I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for."
36
"The primary and most beautiful of Nature's qualities is motion, which agitates her at all times, but this motion is simply a perpetual consequence of crimes, she conserves it by means of crimes only."
36
"I think all fiction should be fair game for the Christian market, except porn, of course."
36
"The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen as children always do I believe when we go back to them."
36
"Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new."
36
"I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it."
35
"Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge."
35
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