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Quotes by Novelist
"Cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues."
6
"At some point, you really just have to finish your work and release it as is-if only so you can go on and make other things with a glad and determined heart."
6
"I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes."
6
"Patience's design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless is that?"
6
"Imagination which comes into play in falling in love is different from any other. Certainly in my case, and I've fallen in love all my life, one imagines the person to be as you want them to be. They frequently turn out to be someone different, for better or worse."
6
"I have in this War a burning private grudge-which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light."
6
"Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late."
6
"There is no French town in which the wounds inflicted on the battle-field are not bleeding."
6
"If you want to control someone, all you have to do is to make them feel afraid."
6
"The Hopi Indians thought that the world's religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm."
6
"Because it doesn't matter anymore, and because I'm so desperately lonely I can't stand it."
6
"Is there any pleasure on earth as great as the circle of Christian friends by a good fire?"
6
"Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism."
6
"Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends."
6
"Of all the Hathaway sisters, Cam said equably, "Beatrix is the one most suited to choose her own husband. I trust her judgment.Beatrix gave him a brilliant smile. "Thank you, Cam."What are you thinking? Leo demanded of his brother-in-law. "You can't trust Beatrix's judgment."Why not?"She's too young, Leo said."I'm twenty-three, Beatrix protested. "In dog years I'd be dead."
6
"It sounds trite, but only because words make everything true sound trite. Because words always screw up what you're trying to say."
6
"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."
6
"I had an inheritance from my father,It was the moon and the sun.And though I roam all over the world,The spending of it's never done."
6
"Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey."
6
"Aelin sighed. 'This place has been shut down for months, and yet I swear I can still hear the music floating in the air.'Rowan angled his head, studying the dark with those immortal senses. 'Perhaps the music does live on, in some form.'The thought made her eyes sting."
6
"A book had always been a door to another world... a world much more interesting and fantastical than reality. But she had finally discovered that life could be even more wonderful than fantasy.And that love could fill the real world with magic."
6
"Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay."
6
"Mento mori-remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die-what makes this any different from a half hour?"
6
"The girl was alluring. Like wildfire, or a summer storm swept off the Gulf of Oro."
6
"Time is not a great healer. It is an indifferent and perfunctory one. Sometimes it does not heal at all. And sometimes when it seems to, no healing has been necessary."
6
"The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain."
6
"You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends."
6
"Your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary."
6
"I was in the mood to make out in the back row of the movie theater with someone who did not know my first name. I wanted three guys to fight for the honor of buying me a drink."
6
"Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say - no detail spared in the quest for perfection."
6
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