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Quotes by Novelist
"The English expression 'to fall asleep' is apt because the transition between waking and sleeping is a gradual drop from one state of being into another: a giving up of full self-consciousness for unconsciousness or for the altered consciousness of dreams."
37
"Once, when I was little, I asked her if she'd cried when my father had fallen to his death.At the funeral? I mean, the burial?No, I did not.Because you weren't sad?Because it was nobody's business if I was."
37
"I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but i know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.....Mockingbirds don't do one thing to but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's garden, don't nest in corncribs,they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
37
"Wait!' he yelled.I didn't turn around, I walked faster. Then I heard him slam his fist on the hood of his car. I almost stopped.Maybe I would have if he'd followed me. But he didn't. He got in his car and he left, just like he said he would."
37
"I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them."
37
"There is an insolence which none but those who themselves deserve contempt can bestow, and those only who deserve no contempt can bear."
37
"One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!"
37
"This was getting bloody ridiculous, he thought savagely. If she became any more adorable, endearing, or delectable, something was going to get broken.Most likely his heart."
37
"A library cannot be made all at once, any more than a house or a nation or a tree; they must all take time to grow, and so must a library. I wouldn't even know what books to go and ask for. I dare say, if I were to try, I couldn't at a moment's notice tell you the names of more than two score of books at the outside. Folk must make acquaintance among books as they would among living folk."
37
"A human act once set in motion flows on forever to the great account. Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what we are."
Act,
37
"While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born."
37
"Jesus, who comes across in the Gospels as extraordinarily strong, begged in the garden, with drops of sweat like blood running down his face, that he might be spared the terrible cup ahead of him, the betrayal and abandonment by his friends, death on the cross. Because Jesus cried out in anguish, we may too. But our fear is less frequent and infinitely less if we are close to the Creator. Jesus, having cried out, then let his fear go, and moved on."
37
"Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice."
37
"Have you ever wondered what a witness is? It's someone who has died, who lives in heaven and watches over the lives of those she loved. That's what I do. I watch you. I cheer you on. I hurt when you hurt."
37
"Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving."
37
"Let me say no more. Words do no justice to the hidden meaning. Everything immediately becomes slightly different when it is expressed in words, a little bit distorted, a little foolish...It is perfectly fine with me that what for one man is precious wisdom for another sounds like foolery."
37
"Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message."
37
"Writing Part of the Scenery has been a very different experience. I have been reminded of people and events, real and imaginary which have been part of my life. This book is a celebration of the land which means so much to me."
37
"You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something - and you can't. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little - not a thing in the world - not even marry an old maid, or get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination."
37
"We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift."
37
"Eventually, we all end up alone."
37
"He seemed to hasten the retreat of departing light by his very presence; the setting sun dipped sharply, as though fleeing before our nigger; a black mist emanated from him; a subtle and dismal influence; a something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil. The circle broke up. The joy of laughter died on stiffened lips."
37
"You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith."
37
"I was at the annual meeting of a state library association a few years later, when the children were in the process of leaving the nest, and one of the librarians asked me, "What do you think you and Hugh have done which was the best for your children?"I answered immediately and without thinking, "We love each other."
37
"Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000."
37
"I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans."
37
"Show me the person ready to step from any, let it be the narrowest, sect of Christian Pharisees into a freer and holier air, and I shall look to find in that person the one of that sect who, in the midst of its darkness and selfish worldliness, mistaken for holiness, has been living a life more obedient than the rest."
37
"I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world."
37
"In our world, I rank music somewhere between hair ribbons and rainbows in terms of usefulness."
37
"I asked, "You mean, you might as well spend your life going upward, through the happy places, since heaven and hell - the destinations - are the same thing anyway?""Same - same," he said. "Same in end, so better to be happy on journey."I said, "So, if heaven is love, then hell is...""Love, too," he said."
37
"Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."
37
"Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself."
37
"Time moved for you not in quotidian beats, but in the slow rhythm the ages keep."
37
"Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right."
37
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