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Quotes by Novelist
"Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being."
53
"Before child labor laws, there were businesses that treated their ten-year-old employees well. society didn't ban child labor because it's impossible to imagine children working in a good environment, but because when you give that much power to businesses over powerless individuals, it's corrupting. When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it's corrupting."
53
"In an instant, everything in the room came alive. Like the sunshine had a melody and the sounds of footsteps had a texture I could feel in my fingertips each time anyone moved."
53
"We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is often at the center of our plates. This doesn't require that we pretend we are going to have a collective agreement. However strong our intuitions are about what's right for us personally and even about what's right for others, we all know in advance that our positions will clash with those of our neighbors. What do we do with that most inevitable reality? Drop the conversation, or find a way to reframe it?"
53
"He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire."
53
"There is the staircase,there is the sun.There is the kitchen,the plate with toast and strawberry jam,your subterfuge,your ordinary mirage.You stand red-handed.You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grassWhat are you supposed to dowith all this loss?In the daylight we knowwhat's gone is gone,but at night it's different.Nothing gets finished,not dying, not mourning;the dead repeat themselves, like clumsy drunkslurching sideways through the doorswe open to them in sleep;these slurred guests, never entirely welcome,even those we have loved the most,especially those we have loved the most,returning from where we shoved themaway too quickly:from under the ground, from under the water,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won't let go."
53
"It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?"
53
"I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings."
53
"We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more."
53
"It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was."
53
"I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."
53
"We hand the meat over to Greasy Sae in the kitchen. She likes District 13 well enough, even though she thinks the cooks are somewhat lacking in imagination. But a woman who came up with a palatable wild dog and rhubarb stew is bound to feel as if her hands are tied here."
53
"Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror."
53
"Somewhere I'd heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoid pleasure during the waning or absent moon out of respect for the bounty this world offers me. I profit from great harvests in life and believe in the importance of seasons."
53
"To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it."
53
"My name is Zia Rashid."
53
"And what do I think about? What thoughts do I have! - What thoughts! a whole host, multitude, and world of thoughts, I keep devising new ones and reworking old ones, some of the old ones are concluded and are only thought of as conclusions, whole worlds of new ones come crashing into my fingers, and it never ends."
53
"At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything -- in other words, utter savages."
53
"It's also possible to have two third person singular points of view, as represented by two characters through whose eyes the story is told in alternating chapters, say."
53
"Talent does what it can; genius does what it must."
52
"It is quite extraordinary how very various are the opinions entertained on this point, and, before sifting them, one must be careful in the first place to eliminate from our inquiry the cases of that considerable class of persons who pinch themselves."
52
"The house cleared, I shut myself in, fastened the bolt that none might intrude, and proceeded-not to weep, not to mourn, I was yet too calm for that, but-mechanically to take off the wedding dress, and replace it by the stuff gown I had worn yesterday, as I thought, for the last time. I then sat down: I felt weak and tired. I leaned my arms on a table, and my head dropped on them. And now I thought: till now I had only heard, seen, moved-followed up and down where I was led or dragged-watched event rush on event, disclosure open beyond disclosure: but now, I thought."
52
"I shot down some German planes and I got shot down myself, crashing in a burst of flames and crawling out, getting rescued by brave soldiers."
52
"Sleepiness seemed to be creeping out of the ground and up their legs, and falling softly out of the air upon theirheads and eyes."
52
"Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity."
52
"In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere."
52
"What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering."
Work,
52
"There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas."
52
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