20th-century Novelist Quotes

When the people clamor to be shielded from reality, when they praise their government for keeping things from them, when they choose to conduct their lives within the limits of whatever fantasy the government supplies, then they are no longer consenting to be governed, they are begging to be ruled.

Michael Ventura

Being hove to in a long gale is the most boring way of being terrified I know.

Donald Hamilton

Have you ever heard the phrase, it is better to keep your mouth closed and have people wonder if you are stupid than open it and remove all doubt? (Hakim al Harbi)

Listening is one of the lesser-known skills that mistresses offer.

Betty Jane Wylie

You can give me detention. Oh, wait, that's right...you aren't the boss of me. So I guess you can just bite me. -Dean

A fool will study for twenty or thirty years and learn how to do something, but a wise man will study for twenty or thirty minutes and become an expert. In this world, it isn't ability that counts, but authority.

I didn't think about anything past tomorrow because anything past tomorrow was just like cloud busting - it depended soley on the person looking at the clouds and it could rain any minute

We have dreamed the world. Our concepts of time and space, the very structure of the universe, are more intimately related to the problems and phenomenon of consciousness than we have seriously suspected.

Michael Talbot (author)

The cry of flesh calling to flesh must be the strongest thing in the world.

A great deal of thought must be given to your daughter's marriage. Otherwise, she will simply slink off like a cat on a dark night to be fertilized under a bush to God knows whom!

The brilliant escape, the funny line to cap it, despite the lack of timing. And the girl was still dead. The last act had not materialised. The world, and himself, remained so far from what they should be: so imperfect.

As Auntie Mame:

Life is a banquet, and some poor suckers are starving to death.

Experience has taught me that what you love, you should love all the harder because someday it will be gone.

But I can see. I can see everything. I can see things that Mom and Dad can't. Or won't.

Happiness is simple. Everything we do to find it is complicated.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. In other words: Home has exceedingly low standards.

It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely

Happiness is the pleasantest of emotions; because of this, it is the most dangerous. Having once felt happiness, one will do anything to maintain it, and losing it, one will grieve.

It can be a little difficult to command attention when surrounded by lunatics,

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

Books don't prattle. Books don't make demands. Yet they give you everything they possess. It's a very satisfying partnership.

Victory is freedom of mind and body.' I believe that is true. I would go further and say that victory is freedom of mind from body. Separation from the thing that imprisons us. Flight. Perhaps freedom from life itself. That is victory. Life is brutal. It is like this whip and these ropes. It hurts. It scars. But we must take it.

They strip-searched me!" he burst out. "Me! Old enough to be their grandfather and they made me stand naked in the road, my things all unpacked in the mud!

At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - relief or despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking - 'wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant!

Gareth Roberts (writer)

People, living their lives here on this earth as human beings with minds.