Novelist Quotes

People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.

The secret idea she was forming of an afterlife gave her the foothold she needed to endure the agonies to come, a newfound courage and optimism which found instant expression through SHOPPING.

I am filled suddenly with hope. I don't think I will ever die. We are looking for ghosts, but, I think, a good story will do.

The rope connecting two men on a mountain is more than nylon protection; it is an organic thing that transmits subtle messages of intent and disposition from man to man; it is an extension of the tactile senses, a psychological bond, a wire along which currents of communication flow.

History is just the present in retrospect. Times change but people do not.

Jeanne C. Stein

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.

Never does one so constantly see so many different things as when peering from a small window.

Boys will be boys and girls will be girls, and if you want it any different you can join a Shubert chorus

Go play golf. Go to the golf course. Hit the ball. Find the ball. Repeat until the ball is in the hole. Have fun. The end.

Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.

Do you know how much damage we could do to each other in an hour?

It is very painful to love someone and believe you cannot be with them.

My writing about Cuba [is] more like an act of creation. Whatever my Cuba is about, it's my own version. I'm not a cultural anthropologist.

Propaganda is a weapon that the Confederacy wields best, and wields heaviest. It is their hammer. And when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

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

Is it not lack of faith that leads men to fear the scrutiny of reason? If the destination is doubtful, than the path must be fraught with fear. A robust faith need not fear, for if God exists, then reason cannot help but lead us to Him. Cogito, ergo Deus est,'says St. Augustine, I think, therefore God is.

Donna Woolfolk Cross

Anglo-Saxon barbarians. Arthur should have been made a Knight

William W. Johnstone

After all, this is a world of rock and water and air. It is elemental. It is not ours.

Look at any city through the right memories and it could become a graveyard as haunted as a former battlefield.

Christopher Rice

The only animal capable of giving man a fair fight is man. Actually, among ourselves, we fight unfairest of all, and the more we practice, the nastier we get.

Robert Buettner

I guess this is how love is when it comes undone. No matter how tight you knit the stitches, a sharp tug on a loose thread will transform your warm sweater into a mangled heap of yarn that you can't reuse or repair.

Love is about needing someone, about feeling as if the day isn't quite right if they're not there. Its about knowing that, no matter how bad a day you've had, the moment you see them again or hear their voice, the world is back in its place.

Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a "sense of place," we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having "a sense of self" means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why.

William Kittredge

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can't get fresh fruit in the shops.