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Quotes by Novelist
"In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you."
48
"She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake's. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation."
48
"Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams..."
48
"And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done-- done, see you!-- under that sky there, every day."
48
"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area."
48
"It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most."
48
"I never met your likeness. Jane: you please me, and you master me - you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced - conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph _I_ can win."
48
"Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread."
48
"He's an egotistical dickhead who's going to chew you up and spit you out; and you have a really awful history of falling for assholes that you ought to run screaming from; and I don't feel like sitting around listening to you try to convince yourself you don't still feel something for Campbell Alexander when, in fact, you've spent the past fifteen years trying to fill in the hole he made inside you."
48
"Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form."
48
"If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all."
48
"Maybe a mother wasn't what she seemed to be on the surface."
48
"He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons."
48
"If nothing else, there's comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering."
48
"One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it."
48
"Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras."
48
"Death's an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew."
48
"Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless."
48
"We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression."
48
"Tell him everything, it is best. He will forgive you."
48
"Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition."
48
"Entrails. No hissing. This is the closest we will ever come to love."
48
"I remembered my mother's speech at my wedding. "In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don't seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other's pain, and being present for it." Who will believe my pain? Who will be present for it?"
48
"Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
48
"We must see what in the Israeli identity - in the Israeli - we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory."
48
"He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break."
48
"Now, come over here so I can pat you down.""But you don't have-" Percy stopped. "Uh, sure."He stood next to the armless statue. Terminus conducted a rigorous mental pat down."You seem to be clean," Terminus decided. "Do you have anything to declare?""Yes," Percy said. "I declare that this is stupid."
48
"To the sea, to the sea! The white gulls are crying,The wind is blowing, and the white foam is flying.West, west away, the round sun is falling, Grey ship, grey ship, do you hear them calling, The voices of my people that have gone before me? I will leave, I will leave the woods that bore me;For our days are ending and our years failing.I will pass the wide waters lonely sailing.Long are the waves on the Last Shore falling,Sweet are the voices in the Lost Isle calling,In Eressea, in Elvenhome that no man can discover,Where the leaves fall not: land of my people forever!"
48
"What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline cracks."
48
"Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head."
48
"Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours - watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it."
48
"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies."
48
"Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear."
48
"To love one's neighbors to love one's enemies to love everything - to love God in all His manifestations - human love serves to love those dear to us but to love one's enemies we need divine love."
48
"I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!"
48
"For instance, if Jesus Christ had died in prison, with no one watching and with no one there to mourn or torture him, would we be saved?With all due respect.According to the agent, the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get."
48
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