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Quotes by Novelist
"The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game."
43
"A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says "I was beaten," he does not say "My men were beaten"."
43
"A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away."
43
"I don't think that when Zionism began there was a claim that we were losing - even in part - our capacity to contribute to other peoples."
43
"It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob."
43
"The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety."
43
"So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair."
43
"During the luncheon he paid attention to no one except his own phantoms."
43
"Love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire."
43
"I think it should be obvious by now that I'm not necessarily interested in reality."
43
"Florentino Ariza never had anotheropportunity to see or talk to Fermina Daza alone in the many chanceencounters of their very long lives until fifty-one years and ninemonths and four days later, when he repeated his vow of eternalfidelity and everlasting love on her first night as a widow."
43
"Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind."
43
"I'll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It's the silence that scares me. It's the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment."
43
"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."
43
"Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity and truth accomplishes no victories without it."
43
"Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers."
43
"There is nothing in the path of life that we don't already know before we start. Nothing important is learned, it is simply remembered."
43
"When I want a broad-minded opinion for general enlightenment, distinct from special advice, I never go to a man who deals in the subject professionally. So I like the parson's opinion on law, the lawyer's on doctoring, the doctor's on business, and my business-man's . . . on morals."
43
"There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity."
43
"You've got to have, like, a lentil for a soul to hate wiener dogs."
43
"Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person."
43
"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable."
43
"It's only his outside, a man can be honest in any sort of skin."
43
"How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world."
43
"He is cured by faith who is sick of fate."
43
"Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory."
43
"You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to."
43
"The Selection was no longer something that was simply happening to me, but something I was actively a part of. I was an Elite."
43
"That is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do."
43
"I am always easy of belief when the creed pleases me."
43
"The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings."
43
"How much time is wasted in what is called thought, but is merely care--an anxious idling over the fancied probabilities of result."
43
"It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change."
43
"Are you ashamed of what I've done?" she dared to ask. His brow creased. "Why would you ever think that?"She couldn't quite look him in the eye as she ran a finger down the blanket. "Are you?"Aedion was silent long enough that she lifted her head - but found him gazing toward the door, as though he could see through it, across the city, to the captain. When he turned to her, his handsome face was open - soft in a way she doubted many ever saw. "Never," he said. "I could never be ashamed of you."
43
"I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred."
43
"An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led."
43
"He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass."
43
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