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Quotes by Novelist
"I never was a person who wanted a handout. I was a cafeteria worker. I'm not too proud to ask the Best Western manager to give me a job. I have cleaned homes."
51
"O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening."
51
"The charm of variety there was not, nor the excitement of incident; but I liked peace so well, and sought stimulus so little, that when the latter came I almost felt it a disturbance, and rather still wished it had held aloof."
51
"He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure."
51
"For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann."
51
"There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward-toward what?"
51
"You can pay for whatever you want, but I just want to warn you that I prefer to stay at places that don't start or end with the word 'motel."
51
"My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol."
51
"Aware of every breath, every movement, I sat in his lap. His hands gently braced my hips as I studied his face. "And now I want you to know, Rhysand, that I love you. I want you to know..." His lips trembled, and I brushed away the tear that escaped down his cheek. "I want you to know," I whispered, "that I am broken and healing, but every piece of my heart belongs to you. And I am honored- honored to be your mate."
51
"But vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands."
51
"If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going."
51
"Because it doesn't matter anymore, and because I'm so desperately lonely I can't stand it."
51
"No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged."
51
"There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught."
51
"I have patience in all things " as far as the antechamber."
51
"Today, it isn't unusual for meat to travel almost halfway around the globe to reach your supermarket. The average distance our meat travels hovers arounf fifteen hundred miles."
51
"The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent."
51
"When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom."
51
"When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?"
51
"There are days when I can hardly make it out of bed. I find it an effort to speak. I measure progress in steps, the next one and the next one, as far as the bathroom. These steps are major accomplishments. I focus on taking the cap off the toothpaste, getting the brush up to my mouth. I have difficulty lifting my arm to do even that. I feel I am without worth, that nothing I can do is of any value, least of all to myself."
51
"As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow."
51
"If he had known unstructured space is a delugeand stocked his log house-boat with all the animals even the wolves, he might have floated. But obstinate hestated, The land is solid and stamped, watching his foot sink down through the stone up to his knee. From "Progressive insanities of a pioneer."
51
"Horses frighten me as much as chickens do,' he said.'That is too bad, because lack of communication with horses has impeded human progress,' said Abrenuncio. 'If we ever broke down the barriers, we could produce the centaur."
51
"Mammy was soon asleep, leaving Laila with dueling emotions: reassured that Mammy meant to live on, stung that she was not the reason. She would never leave her mark on Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed."
51
"You're beautiful. You walk wonderfully and if I were here and saw you now for the first time I'd be in love with you. If I saw you for the first time everything would turn over inside of me and I'd ache right through my chest."
51
"The existence of the writer is an argument against the existence of the soul, for the soul has obviously taken flight from the real ego, but not improved itself, only become a writer."
51
"I'm calm," Rachel insisted. "Every time I'm around you, some monsters attack us. What's to be nervous about?""Look," I said. "I'm sorry about the band room. I hope they didn't kick you our or anything.""Nah. They asked me a lot of questions about you. I played dumb.""Was it hard?" Annabeth asked."
51
"In youth we learn; in age we understand."
51
"I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future."
51
"As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too."
51
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