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Quotes by Novelist
"Each age has deemed the new-born year the fittest time for festal cheer."
42
"This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius."
42
"A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings."
42
"An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form."
42
"I held it up, and tried to channel happy dog thoughts toward Cerberus- Alpo commercials, cute little puppies, fire hydrants."
42
"In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that."
42
"This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak-the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning."
42
"Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are."
42
"Michael nodded tersely, eyeing a table across the room. It was empty. So empty. So joyfully, blessedly empty.He could picture himself a very happy man at that table."Not feeling very conversational this evening, are we?" Colin asked, breaking into his (admittedly tame) fantasies."
42
"The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest."
42
"The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand."
42
"There is curiously little art concerning the efficacy of reason - perhaps simply because reason is not noticeably efficacious."
42
"What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one."
42
"I read the stories I've been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well."
42
"Dealing with any man means dealing with multiple personalities."
42
"Though his death would not fill me with any sense of sadness, I would probably feel the loss. Even enemies are part of one."
42
"He looks around at his guests. All are prepared. A Latin grace; English would be his choice, but he will suit his company. Who cross themselves ostentatiously, in papist style. Who look at him, expectant. He shouts for the waiters. The doors burst open. Sweating men heave the platters to the table. It seems the meat is fresh, in fact not slaughtered yet. It is just a minor breach of etiquette. The company must sit and salivate. The Boleyns are laid at his hand to be carved."
42
"Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance."
42
"The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes."
42
"I love the freedom that the narrative form provides."
42
"The bow cannot always stand bent, nor can human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation."
42
"People who have power respond simply. They have no minds but their own."
42
"People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped."
42
"Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it."
42
"When Gregory says, 'Are they guilty?' he means, 'Did they do it?' But when he says, 'Are they guilty?' he means, 'Did the court find them so?' The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away."
42
"He had the blue kite in his hands, that was the first thing I saw. And I can't lie now and say my eyes didn't scan it for any rips."
42
"It was better to know the worst than to wonder."
42
"There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices."
42
"Something stirred beneath my skin, some being inside I'd only suspected existed, demon or angel, I couldn't say."
42
"The way you remember or dream about your loved ones - the ones who are gone - you can't stop their endings from jumping ahead of the rest of their stories. You don't get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind - in your dreams, in your memories - sometimes the story begins with the epilogue."
42
"Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one."
42
"It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own."
42
"A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep."
42
"There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire."
42
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