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Quotes by Novelist
"The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books."
38
"...one can't avoid the storms and calamities of life, but one can at least find the right partner to face them with."
38
"Independence is all very well, but we animals never allow our friends to make fools of themselves beyond a certain limit; and that limit you've reached."
38
"Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil."
38
"You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself."
38
"If there was anything I learned from John the Baptist, it was that the sooner you confess a mistake, the quicker you can get on to making new and better mistakes."
38
"Diogenes carried a bowl with him for years, but one day saw a man drinking from his cupped palm and declared, 'I have been a fool, burdened all these years by the weight of a bowl when a perfectly good vessel lay at the end of my wrist."
38
"Anything you can acquire is only another thing you'll lose."
38
"Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too."
38
"I pulled out Riptide."
38
"Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates."
38
"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power."
38
"Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--for me, anyway--all that's worth living for lies in that charm?"
38
"She did not want to be a consolation prize. Be pitied or a distraction."
38
"One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error."
38
"Let us hope, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring."
38
"Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless."
38
"Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole."
38
"I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must not for that very reason infallibly be faulty."
38
"The course of true love rarely runs smooth."
38
"My only companion from the outside world during nineteen years of isolation has been my personal hatred of Thursday Next. It's kind of like the old me suddenly taking over, and I promised myself that this was how I would act if I ever saw you.' 'I have the same thing, but with Tom Stoppard,' I said. 'You'd kill Tom Stoppard?' 'Not at all. I promised myself many years ago that I would throw myself at his feet and scream "I'm not worthy!" if I ever met him, so now if we're ever at the same party or something, I have to be at pains to avoid him. It would be undignified, you see-for him and for me."
38
"It's like losing gravity and falling into space " the moment of pitching headlong when the endlessness of space asserts itself and there is no more down, only an eternity of up, and you realize you can fall forever and never run out of stars."
38
"Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts."
38
"There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads-they couldn't be fair if they tried."
38
"Are you guys busy?" Juniper asked. "Well," I said, "we're in the middle of this game against a bunch of monsters and we're trying not to die." "We're not busy," Annabeth said."
38
"I resolved to take Fate by the throat and shake the living out of her."
38
"A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs."
38
"A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect."
38
"It's clearly more important to treat one's fellow man well than to be always praying and fasting and touching one's head to a prayer mat."
38
"This has to be the most self-centered thing I've ever said, but no, I think you just wanted to vex me."
38
"Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin."
38
"I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative."
38
"When it began to grow dark, the Rat, with an air of excitement and mystery, summoned them back into the parlour, stood each of them up alongside of his little heap, and proceeded to dress them up for the coming expedition."
38
"But if we are talking in terms of making progress in life, we must understand that "good enough" is very different from "best."
38
"Scratch a cynic and you will find a disappointed romantic."
38
"I volunteered for this life, wanted it and am not going to bitch about it now that I've got it."
38
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