top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Novelist
"I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief."
60
"Kaltain unleashed the last of her shadowfire, tipping her face to the ceiling, toward a sky she'd never see again. She took every wall and every column. As she brought it all crashing and crumbling around them, Kaltain smiled, and at last burned herself into ash on a phantom wind."
60
"Fair means everyone gets what they need. And the only way to get what you need is to make it happen yourself."
60
"Empty is the perfect state of being. Nothing inside to anchor you. Nothing inside to chain you down, keep you from living your dreams. Empty, almost weightless, you are an eyelash afloat on a blink of breeze. You can rise about tension and worry, loosed from the grip of gravity. Adrift in thermal lift, you ride the wing of freedom and soar. Empty, you are Eve in Eden. Empty, you are what you were meant to be."
60
"If all the seven stones were laid out before me now, I should shut my eyes and put my hands in my pockets."
60
"A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist."
60
"I hear they're all infected with chlamydia, which just goes to show that you really can't tell who's got the clam. I mean, look at a picture of a koala, tell me you're not shocked."
60
"If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth."
60
"One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals."
59
"Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man - Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?"
59
"Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going."
59
"It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do."
59
"Curiosity is a descending stair that leads to only who-knows-where."
59
"Ahab and aguish lay stretched together in one hammock."
59
"Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can."
59
"I write for a certain sphere of readers in the United States who on average watch seven and a half hours of multichannel television per day."
59
"Dream bigger before you can't remember to dream at all."
59
"A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one."
59
"It is possible for the human spirit to win after all."
59
"Before, I suspected I might not amount to anything, and now I now I won't, so at least it takes away the wearisome burden of delusive hope."
59
"Sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them."
59
"The only things you learn are the things you tame."
59
"I attended the University of Louisville my freshman year, transferred to what was then Western Kentucky State Teachers College for my sophomore and junior years, and then graduated from the University of Louisville in the summer of 1961."
59
"Tis the only comfort of the miserable to have partners in their woes."
59
"How sweet is that? I know I'm no boy expert, but I have heard entire lectures on reading body language, and I have to say that assuming that a person will have forgotten your name is way high on my 'indicators of humbleness' list (not that I have one, but I totally have a starting point now)."
59
"If you look closely, there is no book more visual than Three Trapped Tigers, in that it is filled with blank pages, dark pages, it has stars made of words, the famous magical cube made of numbers, and there is even a page which is a mirror."
59
"You keep right on building that fence, Faye. See what good it does you."
59
"I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before."
59
"And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the Elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness."
59
"Relinquish! What! my vocation? My great work? My foundation laid on earth for a mansion in heaven? My hopes of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race - of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance - of substituting peace for war - freedom for bondage - religion for superstition - the hope of heaven for the fear of hell? Must I relinquish that? It is dearer than the blood in my veins. It is what I have to look forward to, and to live for."
59
"After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?"
59
"Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite."
59
"Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign, and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell--the hell of your own meanness."
59
"Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."
59
"Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys."
59
"My father was a Norwegian who came from a small town near Oslo. He broke his arm at the elbow when he was 14, and they amputated it."
59
"Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving."
59
"Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle."
59
bottom of page