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Quotes by Novelist
"In the story of the prince and the frog, there's always a frog. This story ... it has no frog."
23
"If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it."
23
"Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows."
23
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him."
23
"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."
23
"Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down."
23
"Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own."
23
"Katniss: 'What about you? Ive seen you in the market. You can lift hundred pound bags of flour'. I snap at himTell him that. Thats not nothing.Peeta: Yes and Im sure the arena will be full of bags of flour for me to chuck at people."
23
"In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world."
23
"Virtue in a woman is like pepper in the soup. A little makes for a nice seasoning. Butoverdo it, and no one wants very much of you."
23
"For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better."
23
"All his court were cast down in slumber, and all the fires faded and were quenched; but the Silmarils in the crown on Morgoth's head blazed forth suddenly with a radiance of white flame; and the burden of that crown and of the jewels bowed down his head, as though the world were set upon it, laden with a weight of care, of fear, and of desire, that even the will of Morgoth could not support. Then LAothien catching up her winged robe sprang into the air, and her voice came dropping down like rain into pools, profound and dark. She cast her cloak before his eyes, and set upon him a dream, dark as the outer Void where once he walked alone."
23
"I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others-the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad."
23
"I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off."
23
"Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes it takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape of love."
23
"When man wanted to make a machine that would walk he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg."
22
"Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity."
22
"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
22
"He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all."
22
"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences."
22
"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe."
22
"For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking."
22
"Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience."
22
"Don't just count your years, make your years count."
22
"If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic."
22
"One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived."
22
"Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that I was a complete Hitchcock fanatic from age 9."
22
"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."
22
"I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer."
22
"Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can."
22
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