20th-century Novelist Quotes

Shrews are not mutual murderers. We'll just square off and touch whiskers, assessing each other. Then we'll try to out-squeak each other.

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)

Romance is not an idea, but a moment. An unspoken glance when someone looks into your eyes and knows exactly who you are, what you need.

We have to use our freedoms and privileges to see what respite we can give to those less equipped to deal with their challenges.

Dreadful birds, dressed in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Is it for you to forgive me? Is it for me to forgive you? Is it for God to forgive us all, and for what? Where there's no judging on one side or the other, there's no forgiveness wanted.

E. Arnot Robertson

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.

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.

The only situation which might justify panic is one in which panic is likely to help. Such a situation never arises. Though pretended panic may sometimes cause a useful diversion, real panic can never be anything other than a waste of energy.

Some men were nothing but overgrown boys who never got over the "fun" of teasing girls, just to get noticed

Esther Friesner

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.

Morse stared morosely at the blotting paper. "It's just not my sort of case, Lewis. I know it's not a very nice thing to say, but I just get on better when we've got a body — a body that died from unnatural causes. That's all I ask. And we haven't got a body."

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.

I have tried many times to express my feelings, but at each attempt, I find myself tongue-tied.

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

The gamblers' blood that flowed through Mama's and Papa's veins influenced every decision they had made in their lives. It seemed perfectly normal for us to trust a roll of the dice to decide where we lived, attended school, went on vacation, took jobs, and whom we married.

Carolina Garcia-Aguilera

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