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Quotes by Novelist
"For me, words are just words, nothing else."
47
"It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid."
47
"Me? Beautiful? I'm plain as cardboard. That may be how you see yourself, but the rest of the world would be hard to agree. You shine brighter than the Milky Way.Now there are those who might try to take that from you, but you don't have to give it away. Keep on shining Pattyn.And when the right young man comes along, he'll love you all the more for giftin' this sad planet with your light."
47
"I hate to be what is called a clever girl-there are too many of that sort now!"
47
"Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair."
47
"In Maycomb, if one went for a walk with no definite purpose in mind, it was correct to believe one's mind incapable of definite purpose."
47
"You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know."
47
"My help-it's not a light switch you can turn on and off. My help starts right now, and after this point you don't get to tell me that you don't want it anymore. Understand? You had a chance to walk away, Alice, and you didn't take it. Now it's time to play the game."
47
"It was not a bed with curtains, but a bed with doors like shutters. This may not seem like a nice way of having a bed, but we would all be glad of the wooden curtains about us at night if we lived in such a cottage, on the side of a hill along which the wind swept like a wild river. Through the cottage it would be streaming all night long. And a poor woman with a cough, or a man who has been out in the cold all day, is very glad of such a place to lie in, and leave the the rest of the house to the wind and the fairies."
47
"P.S. May, don't these strawberry tarts just make you want to cry?"
47
"I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists."
47
"The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face."
47
"You ask me if I do not think that men are strange beings - I do indeed, I have often thought so - and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange, they are not half sufficiently guarded from temptation - Girls are protected as if they were something very frail and silly indeed while boys are turned loose on the world as if they - of all beings in existence, were the wisest and the least liable to be led astray."
47
"When I am constantly running there is no time for being. When there is no time for being there is no time for listening."
47
"It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion."
47
"Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete."
47
"After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy."
47
"You're in a rather odd mood today."I'm soaking wet, Eloise."No need to snap at me about it, I didn't force you to walk across town in the rain."It wasn't raining when I left,". There was something about a sibling that brought out the eight-year-old in a body.I'm sure the sky was gray," Clearly, she had a bit of the eight-year-old in her as well."
47
"The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that 'black hole' is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions-nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur."
47
"Anything was better than nothing. Half-full was better than empty. Ignorance was the lowest form of humiliation and suffering."
47
"She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing."
47
"What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness."
47
"I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains."
47
"The memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed quite new to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back next day."
47
"It's hard luck always having to be a judge."
47
"Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit."
47
"The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say - because they were too obvious."
47
"If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea."
47
"I wish I had only offered youa sovereign instead of ten pounds. Give me back nine pounds, Jane; I've a use for it.''And so have I, sir,' I returned, putting my hands and my purse behind me. 'I could not spare the money on any account.''Little niggard!' said he, 'refusing me a pecuniary request! Give me five pounds, Jane.''Not five shillings, sir; nor five pence.''Just let me look at the cash.''No, sir; you are not to be trusted."
47
"Stop thinking all the time that you're in the way, that you're bothering the person next to you. If people don't like it, they can complain. And if they don't have courage to complain, that's their problem."
47
"One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not."
47
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