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Quotes by Novelist
"Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years."
24
"Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
24
"Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong."
24
"It is a pity that doing one's best does not always answer."
24
"I am two women: one wants to have all the joy, passion and adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be a slave to routine, to family life, to the things that can be planned and achieved. I'm a housewife and a prostitute, both of us living in the same body and doing battle with each other."
24
"They say: misfortunes, sufferings...well, if someone said to me right now, this minute: do you want to remain the way you were before captivity, or live through it all over again? For God's sake, captivity again and horsemeat! Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it's only here that the new and the good begins. As long as there's life, there's happiness. There's much, much still to come."
24
"There's this sense of excitement because you invent and control the characters. You decide whether they live or die. I find this type of creative process tremendously stimulating."
23
"Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet."
23
"Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness."
23
"If possible, try to avoid pushing each other over the edge, as that would cause me extra paperwork."
23
"If high heels were so wonderful, men would be wearing them."
23
"Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't."
23
"Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual."
23
"Anger ventilated often hurries towards forgiveness; anger concealed often hardens into revenge."
23
"I would rather make my name than inherit it."
23
"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power."
23
"The absent are like children, helpless to defend themselves."
23
"Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat."
23
"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
23
"Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream."
23
"When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely."
23
"There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones."
23
"The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream."
23
"The gratification of wealth is not found in mere possession or in lavish expenditure, but in its wise application."
23
"At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone."
23
"There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years."
23
"She also liked to remember that there could be no such thing as an intentional imperfection. People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good."
23
"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
23
"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred."
23
"For the human mind is seldom at stay: If you do not grow better, you will most undoubtedly grow worse."
23
"Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the beach. The crash of every wave awakens far-distant reverberations within me... I hear the rumble of bygone days, and in my mind the whole endless series of old passions surges forward like the billows. I remember my spasms, my sorrows, gusts of desire that whistled like wind in the rigging, and vast vague longings that swirled in the dark like a flock of wild gulls in a stormcloud... On whom should I lean, if not on you? My weary mind turns for refreshment to the thought of you as a dusty traveler might sink onto a soft and grassy bank..."
23
"A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home."
23
"I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come."
23
"I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism "To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom..." & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye."
23
"You have a... remarkable memory.""I remember everything about you. You're the one who wasn't paying attention."
23
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