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Quotes by Novelist
"One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop."
36
"Well, girls always love assholes, said Platt, not bothering to dispute this. "Haven't you noticed? No, I thought bleakly, untrue. Else why didn't Pippa love me?"
36
"There are boys you look at and want to touch with your mouth, and there are boys you look at and want to wear one of those surgical masks everyone in China had during bird flu. There are a lot more bird-flu boys at large."
36
"The Crown Prince of Adarlan stared him down. "And consider where your true loyalties lie."Once, Chaol might have argued. Once, he might have protested that his loyalty to the crown was his greatest asset. But that blind loyalty and obedience had started this descent.And it had destroyed everything."
36
"No matter what you or anyone else does, there will be someone who says that there's something bad about it."
Will,
36
"We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box."
36
"I love the smell of book ink in the morning."
36
"If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it."
36
"There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great, great powers, and I would say we only have learnt a very, very small part of what it can do."
36
"I don't even like old cars. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake."
36
"The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad."
36
"I hate New Year's Eve. One more chance to remember that you haven't yet done what you wanted. And to pretend it doesn't matter."
36
"A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns."
36
"I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor."
36
"Nothing is more tragic than loving someone to the depths of your soul and knowing they cannot and will not ever love you back."
36
"Sad stories make good books."
36
"The new father finally hangs up the phone, laughing at absolutely nothing. "Congratulations," I say, when what I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in stars so that she never, ever does to him what I have done to my parents."
36
"The disgraced Usurer Yankel D took the baby girl home that evening... He made a bed of crumpled newspaper in a deep baking pan and gently tucked it in the oven, so that she wouldn't be disturbed by the noise of the small falls outside... When he pulled her out to feed her or just hold her, her body was tattooed with the newsprint... Sometimes he would rock her to sleep in his arms, and read her left to right, and know everything he needed to know about the world. If it wasn't written on her, it wasn't important to him."
36
"Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity."
36
"Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness."
36
"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."
36
"But that's the thing about being the girl who's spent years convincing the world she's not afraid of anything: At some point, someone is going to find out you're afraid of everything."
36
"Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness."
36
"People usually asked her if she had a belly button. Of course she had a belly button. She couldn't explain how. She didn't really want to know."
36
"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure..... Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle , and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?"
36
"Always say yes and try before you say no."
36
"To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit."
36
"I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot."
36
"I had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trode the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre."
36
"After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?"
36
"Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile."
36
"It does seem as if the more one gets the more one wants."
36
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