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Quotes by Novelist
"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."
55
"When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark."
55
"To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart."
55
"Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost."
55
"A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous."
55
"The tattoo is there not because I believe there is something wrong with me. It's there to remind me that our flaws are our strengths."
55
"Those were great big angry men with sharp swords actually wanting to cut pieces off me. It's not until you've seen a red gaping wound and all the complex little bits inside a man all broken up and sliced open, and known that they weren't ever getting back together again, and vomited your last two meals over the rocks . . . it's not until then that you understand the business of swords properly and, if you're a sensible man you vow to have nothing to do with it ever again."
55
"Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood."
55
"Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood."
55
"There is no French town in which the wounds inflicted on the battle-field are not bleeding."
55
"Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak... surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that."
55
"The earl shook his head, exhibiting a degree of frosty offense that could only be achieved by an aristocrat whose wishes had just been gainsaid. "I've never heard of a man being so eager to confess to the parent of a girl he's just ruined, he said sourly."
55
"In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement."
55
"Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest."
55
"That's what I meant,' said Pippin. 'We hobbits ought to stick together, and we will. I shall go, unless they chain me up. There must be someone with intelligence in the party."
55
"I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level."
55
"Don't trust your head, Samwise, it is not the best part of you."
55
"Stories close the gap and reconcile between what we want life to be and how it actually is."
55
"You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail."
55
"And thus it happens that the reader, the closer he comes to the novel's end, the more he wishes he were back in the summer with which it begins, and finally, instead of following the hero onto the cliffs of suicide, joyfully turns back to that summer, content to stay there forever."
55
"The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever."
55
"One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving."
55
"We've got to have mind-collecting weeks in our zendos where your mind tries to fly off like a Tinker Toy and like a good soldier you put it back together with your eyes closed except of course the whole thing is wrong."
55
"He could swear he did not look back, could not-by any optical chance, or in any prism-have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture-which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never-consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past."
55
"It was important not to offend against the laws of magic. If a woman left you it was because you did not cast the right spell over her, or else because someone else cast a stronger enchantment than yours, or else because your marriage was cursed in such a way that it cut the ties of love between husband and wife. Why did So-and-so enjoy success in his businesses? Because he visited the right enchanter. There was a thing in the emperor that rebelled against all this flummery, for was it not a kind of infantilization of the self to give up one's power of agency and believe that such power resided outside oneself rather than within? This was also his objection to God, that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves."
55
"Leap out the window, my inner Tigress cried. You aren't ready to face such a powerful Tiger. I frowned. I thought a true Tigress never backed down from a fight. Don't you know anything? When she's in heat, she avoids everything male. Now run!"
55
"To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one."
54
"Strictly speaking, every citizen above a certain level of income is guilty of some offense."
54
"With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence."
54
"No one could be more happy than a man who has never known affliction."
54
"Next to excellence is the appreciation of it."
54
"The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities."
54
"In the fight between you and the world, back the world."
54
"We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally."
54
"There are no conditions to which a man cannot become accustomed."
54
"You ask yourself not if this or that is expedient, but if it is right."
54
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