20th-century Novelist Quotes

The healthy, the strong individual, is the one who asks for help when he needs it. Whether he has an abscess on his knee or in his soul.

Hey, God made us sexual creatures. If he wanted teenagers to wait that long, he would have made puberty start at twenty-five.

It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.

Christopher Fowler

That was the problem with getting used to people - you had to miss them when they were gone.

Protective coloration...you learn to use it to get along in the world if you want. Only I got sick of living in the box the world prescribed; it was far to small to hold me. So I knocked down a few walls.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

Every death diminishes us, but those that leave differences unresolved and things unsaid are the most painful of all.

Happiness—a small-scale, endearing, harmonious happiness—surely dwelt here beneath the low-powered lamps in the tiny rooms of these houses. A small-scale happiness and a modest harmony: let a man cry out, let him rage, let him howl with grief with all the power of which he was capable, what more than these could he ever hope to gain in this life?

You kids were all in college, and I suddenly saw that I was stuck alone with a man who, all those years later, was still wanting me to be someone I wasn't.

Barbara Delinsky

Most men, if you just tell them what to do in a businesslike fashion, will follow directions without thinking about it. One proceeds on the assumption that they'll do as they're told, and they do.

Lynne Reid Banks

Maybe you've got the patience to work out some complicated, long-term, ironic way to get back at the people who've wronged you, but that's you.

Greg Cox (writer)

Each man of us is living his own personal work of art, and cannot evade artistic responsibility for his product.

Richard McKenna

If you don't feel as close to God today as you did yesterday, who moved?

Chris Heimerdinger

You know the sultans used to light their garden parties with turtles? They'd put candles on their backs and let them wander around. Hundreds of them.

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.

But everyone has a touch of madness, and those who can't admit it are usually farther gone than the rest of us.

It should be easy now to see there have never been people to save anybody but themselves, never in the past, never now, and there will never be any saviors if each will not save himself.

You'd have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn't seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, it's deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall.

Anyone who works on a quilt, who devotes her time, energy, creativity, and passion to that art, learns to value the work of her hands. And as any quilter will tell you, a quilter's quilting friends are some of the dearest, most generous, and most supportive people she knows.

Jennifer Chiaverini

As Romeo and Juliet found to their cost, marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about families.

Sex without love is like a goddamn business transaction. And sometimes both parties feel as if they got a good deal, but that doesn't make it any less so.

This boy turkied my Thanksgiving, but I won't let him Grinch my Christmas. -Dean Hughes (Midway to Heaven)

Blackouts can be fun if approached with the right mindset. You just can't sweat the fact that you've lost a small portion of your life for all eternity. Occasionally, little bubbles of memory will float up like surreal Mylar party balloons at unexpected times throughout the net day and start piecing together a colorful, if incomplete, version of reality.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.

Thomas reached out and took my hand, turned it palm up, and said, "I believe that's healing very nicely." Aunt Charlotte opened the door just as he turned my hand over again and brushed a kiss across my knuckles. I experienced a nearly overpowering desire to hit him in the eye.

Caroline Stevermer