top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Novelist
"To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations."
Past,
38
"O, lack and doubt and fear can only comeBecause of plenty, confidence, and love!They are the shadow-forms about their feet,Because they are not perfect crystal-clearTo the all-searching sun in which they live.Dread of its loss is Beauty's certain seal!"
38
"Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all."
38
"Well,' I said, 'Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn't what you feel in New York - 'He was smiling. I stopped.'What do you feel in New York?' he asked.'Perhaps you feel,' I told him, 'all the time to come. There's such power there, everything is in such movement. You can't help wondering-I can't help wondering-what it will all be like-many years from now."
38
"Of course some days are easier than others, but my worst day is better than being in most humdrum occupations."
38
"When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision--eating 'like everyone else'--is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic."
38
"Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing."
38
"I would never speak about faith, but speak about the Lord himself - not theologically, as to the why and wherefore of his death - but as he showed himself in his life on earth, full of grace, love, beauty, tenderness and truth. Then the needy heart cannot help hoping and trusting in him, and having faith, without ever thinking about faith. How a human heart with human feelings and necessities is ever to put confidence in the theological phantom which is commonly called Christ in our pulpits, I do not know. It is commonly a miserable representation of him who spent thirty-three years on our Earth, living himself into the hearts and souls of men, and thus manifesting God to them."
38
"You're Ma's own blood son, but did she take on that time Tony Fontaine shot you in the leg? No, she just sent for old Doc Fontaine to dress it and asked the doctor what ailed Tony's aim. Said she guessed the licker was spoiling his marksmanship."
38
"O beautiful, to make escapeAnd leave this world behind.Had I to stay another dayI'd lose my fucking mind!"
38
"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."
38
"He was a sceptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel."
38
"The loss of liberty which must attend being a wife was of all things the most horrible to my imagination."
38
"It's idiotic, it's crazy. If you die and then you're just nothing, there isn't any point to anything. Why do we live at all if we die and stop being? Father wasn't ready to be stopped. No one's ready to be stopped. We don't have *time* to be ready to be stopped. It's all crazy. . . . Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but *he* is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through."
38
"You know, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.''And yet it is still extremely funny."
38
"Rowan considered for a moment, and then said, "I have known many kings in my life, Dorian Havilliard. And it was a rare man indeed who asked for help when he needed it, who would put aside pride."
38
"Being inside this cottage, with dark wooden walls and hand - carved furniture like my own home, cast a darkened stain onto my heart."
38
"Nicolai, the Dark Seducer as his people called him, had been in bed, but not alone. He was never alone. He was a man known for the violence of his temper as well as the deliciousness of his touch."
38
"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."
38
"One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness."
38
"Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
38
"He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening to the pianist who was playing a piece by Granados with velvet fingers."
38
"Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion."
38
"Jo's face was a study next day, for the secret rather weighed upon her, and she found it hard not to look mysterious and important. Meg observed it, but did not troubled herself to make inquiries, for she had learned that the best way to manage Jo was by the law of contraries, so she felt sure of being told everything if she did not ask."
38
"Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us a Secret."
38
"It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones."
38
"Every man's memory is his private literature."
38
"It is not rubbish! It is the part of people that you do not understand."
38
"It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable females with rich jointures, a prey for the vilest bonzes, who hide their flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin when they might multiply the inlets of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of their sex when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this, he assured them, made his heart weep."
38
"At present, however, with his aching head and queasy stomach, Sebastian was feeling exceedingly resistible. Or if not that, then resistant. Aphrodite herself could descend from the ceiling, floating on a bloody clamshell, naked but for a few well-placed flowers, and he'd likely puke at her feet.No, no, she ought to be completely naked. If he was going to prove the existence of a goddess, right here in this room, she was damned well going to be naked.He'd still puke on her feet, though."
38
"New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be."
38
"Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron, Sebastian said approvingly. "Excellent choice."You have read this? Alexei asked."It's not as good as Miss Davenport and the Dark Marquis, of course, but worlds better than Miss Sainsbury and the Mysterious Colonel.Harry found himself rendered speechless."I'm reading Miss Truesdale and the Silent Gentleman right now."Silent? Harry echoed."There is a noticeable lack of dialogue, Sebastian confirmed."
38
"Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul."
38
"Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd's can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb."
38
"In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.'I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately."
38
bottom of page