top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Novelist
"All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired."
39
"Where are they written?" "In the world around us. Merely be attentive to what happens in your life, and you will discover where, every moment of the day, He hides His words and His will. Seek to do as He asks: this alone is the reason you are in the world." "If I discover it, I'll write it on clay tablets.""Do so. But write them, above all, in your heart; there they can neither burned nor destroyed, and you will take them wherever you go."
39
"A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name."
39
"An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy."
39
"Reading off a page is like looking down at a landscape from a balloon " your eye "sees" the story as well as reads it, its layout, its paragraphs and structure, and "remembers" what it just read because it's still there, on the page, simultaneously. If you want to, you can reread any line instantly; or linger; or speed up; or optically "flinch." Reading a series of tweets is more like looking through a narrow window from a train speeding through a landscape full of tunnels and bands of light and dark. Each tweet erases its predecessor."
39
"The course of every intellectual if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough ends in the obvious from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred."
39
"They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice."
39
"Sometimes it seems that light can transform anything! That it is an undeniable and irreducible metaphor for grace. But do the people of the ranchitos know this? Is it for beauty that they do it? Or do they merely want a comfortable illumination in their little shacks?It doesn't matter.We can't stop ourselves from making beauty. We can't stop the world."
39
"Do you think it is a vain hope that one day man will find joy in noble deeds of light and mercy, rather than in the coarse pleasures he indulges in today -- gluttony, fornication, ostentation, boasting, and envious vying with his neighbor? I am certain this is not a vain hope and that the day will come soon."
39
"Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash."
39
"Nature had squandered an unreasonable quantity of male beauty on this undeserving creature."
39
"The gift blesses the giver."
39
"Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?"
39
"You are going, Jane?""I am going, sir.""You are leaving me?""Yes.""You will not come? You will not be my comforter, my rescuer? My deep love, my wild woe, my frantic prayer, are all nothing to you?"What unutterable pathos was in his voice! How hard was it to reiterate firmly, "I am going!""Jane!""Mr. Rochester.""Withdraw then, I consent; but remember, you leave me here in anguish. Go up to your own room, think over all I have said, and, Jane, cast a glance on my sufferings; think of me."He turned away, he threw himself on his face on the sofa. "Oh, Jane! my hope, my love, my life!" broke in anguish from his lips. Then came a deep, strong sob."
39
"When I was 6 I wanted to be a nurse. When I was 14 I wanted to be a spy or a lion tamer. When I was 16 I wanted too be a highwire walker or an acrobat. Or maybe a clown with a white face. Then I gave up wanting to be anything other than what I am and what I am is a woman with a woman's needs and a woman's desires."
39
"Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions."
39
"Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or-and the outward semblance is the same-crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more."
39
"Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own."
39
"But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way."
39
"That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways."
39
"The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy - yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible."
38
"Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne."
38
"Opium: that terrible truth serum. Dark secrets guarded for a lifetime can be divulged with carefree folly after a sip of the black smoke."
38
"Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face-at least to my taste-his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul."
38
"There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind."
38
"People are much more inclined to believe and say bad things about you if you're famous."
38
"Time, as is well known, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don't notice whether it's passing quickly or slowly."
38
"The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society."
38
"There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties or you alter yourself meeting them."
38
Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermín had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills. Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That’s the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.
38
"War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war."
38
"Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
38
"Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again."
38
bottom of page