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Quotes by Novelist
"A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth."
35
"My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can't live without dreaming - as we can't live without sleep. We are 'conscious' beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep - the 'unconscious.' It is nourishing, in ways we can't fully understand."
35
"Einstein...even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living."
35
"Sometimes you have to give the hurt a noise and let it out. If you don't, it fills you up with its emptiness."
35
"You were the one who changed us when you left me in the tree house; and you keep thinking that if you push hard enough, you can make everything go back to before that moment. It doesn't work that way. Give me a chance to choose you."
35
"The hardest thing in the world is to be original. It seems like our heads are filled with banalities and clichés. You have to keep digging deeper and deeper to try and find a fresh new seam that hasn't been explored."
35
"I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts."
35
"If you were going to die, I was going to die with you. I couldn't stop thinking it over and over as you screamed, as I tried to kill her: you were my mate my mate my mate."
35
"I was at a loss suddenly; but conscious all the while of how Armand listened; that he listened in the way that we dream of others listening, his face seeming to reflect on every thing said. He did not start forward to seize on my slightest pause, to assert an understanding of something before the thought was finished, or to argue with a swift, irresistible impulse -- the things which often make dialogue impossible.And after a long interval he said, 'I want you. I want you more than anything in the world."
35
"Gentlemen, be courteous to the old maids, no matter how poor and plain and prim, for the only chivalry worth having is that which is the readiest to to pay deference to the old, protect the feeble, and serve womankind, regardless of rank, age, or color."
35
"She would fill the world with it, with her light-her gift. She would light up the darkness, so brightly that all who were lost or wounded or broken would find their way to it, a beacon for those who still dwelled in that abyss. It would not take a monster to destroy a monster-but light, light to drive out the darkness.She was not afraid."
35
"Hope like that, as I thought before, doesn't make you a weak person. It's hopelessness that makes you weak. Hope makes you stronger, because it brings with it a sense of reason. Not a reason for how or why they were taken from you, but a reason for you to live. Because it's a maybe. A 'maybe someday things won't always be this shit.' And that 'maybe' immediately makes the shittiness better."
35
"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
35
"No, I'm not choosing him or you. I'm choosing me."
35
"In life there are perfect moments. You cannot plan them - the very act interferes with the laws of the universe - but you must be ready to recognise them when they come."
35
"It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine."
35
"What did Finnick Odair want? he asks.I turn and put my lips close to Peeta's and drop my eyelids in imitation of Finnick. "He offered me sugar and wanted to know all my secrets, I say in my best seductive voice.Peeta laughs. "Ugh. Not really."Really, I say. "I'll tell you more when my skin stops crawling."
35
"Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant, I act under orders."
35
"I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object."
Sex,
35
"Hey. I just wanted to make sure you got home," I say. "Katniss, I live three houses away from you," he says."
35
"We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation."
35
"People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you choose between the two realities. There is so much pain here."
35
"Oh, go ahead and giggle," Lady Danbury sighed. "I've found that the only way to avoid parental frustration is to view him as a source of amusement."
35
"I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds."
35
"What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it's that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness ofnormality that is just a myth."
35
"It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory."
35
"I wanted everything from and everything for him, because I wanted every piece of him."
35
"My home is attached to a study - in fact, my home is my study, and I have a little room to sleep in. I need to write looking onto the street or a landscape. Looking at reality from some distance gives me romantic visions."
35
"And I go home having lost her love. And write this book."
35
"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted."
35
"A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way."
35
"The Friday before winter break, my mom packed me an overnight bag and a few deadly weapons and took me to a new boarding school."
35
"St. John's eyes, though clear enough in a literal sense, in a figurative one were difficult to fathom. He seemed to use them rather as instruments to search other people's thoughts, than as agents to reveal his own: the which combination of keenness and reserve was considerably more calculated to embarrass than to encourage."
35
"Good fighting with you, Seaweed Brain."Ditto."
35
"Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied."
35
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