top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Novelist
"I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there."
34
"In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst."
34
"He looked at his friend, perhaps for the last time, and said what he had always known, from the moment they'd met, when he'd understood that the prince was his brother in soul. "I love you."
34
"I am ashamed of confessing that I have nothing to confess."
34
"But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground."
34
"I knew she was right. Of course she was right. Bex was always right. She knew me better than I knew myself. But then again, isn't that a best friend's job?"
34
"Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true."
34
"It will cost me a lot to send you with Scott wearing that dress but, just so you know: if you come with that dress even slightly wrinkled, I will trace Scott, and when I find him, it's not gonna be pretty."
34
"Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. Its their way of falling."
34
"To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world."
34
"Never! while heaven spares my reason, ' replied I, snatching away the hand he had presumed to seize and press between his own."
34
"It has often struck me that the relation of two important members of the social body to one another has never been sufficiently considered, or treated of, so far as I know, either by the philosopher or the poet."
Body,
34
"Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul."
34
"If a teacher has only love for the cause, it will be a good teacher. If a teacher has only love for student, as a father, mother, he will be better than the teacher, who read all the books, but has no love for the cause, nor to the students. If the teacher combines love to the cause and to his disciples, he is the perfect teacher."
34
"I am talking about misery and all of its implications."
34
"Abby Von Normal - And I'm like, 'Don't change the subject, Kung Pao, what I want to know is if you're ready to spend some up-close and personal time with ninety pounds of barbarian woman-flesh! Sorry, I don't know how much that is in kilos."
34
"And so Gotama wandered into the town to obtain alms, and the two Samanas recognized him only by his complete peacefulness of demeanor, by the stillness of his form, in which there was no seeking, no will, no counterfeit, no effort - only light and peace."
34
"I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel."
34
"I daresay something will happen, between now and '91, to make your fortunes look up."
34
"It's amazing how photography can capture just a split second of something exquisite."
34
"When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing."
34
"Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees."
34
"You can't be said to have properly established yourself in a place until you have been seen there."
34
"1776: A declaration of the Parlement of Paris:The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position."
34
"To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells."
34
"They say the best things in life are free, and they are if you can afford them."
34
"Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it."
34
"No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it."
34
"The pleasures of the mighty are obtained by the tears of the poor."
34
"When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn't any reclaiming it or revising it."
34
"He who can take advice is sometimes superior to him who can give it."
34
"After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more."
34
"I am asking you to marry me because I love you, he said, "because I cannot imagine living my life without you. I want to see your face in the morning, and then at night, and a hundred times in between. I want to grow old with you, I want to laugh with you, and I want to sigh to my friends about how managing you are, all the while secretly knowing I am the luckiest man in town."What? she demanded.He shrugged. "A man's got to keep up appearances. I'll be universally detested if everyone realizes how perfect you are."
34
"All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language."
34
"As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment."
34
"Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you."
34
"She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it."
34
"'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come."
34
"Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars."
34
bottom of page