Novelist Quotes

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

Writing that gets rewritten as the earth moves. If you look at the sky that way, it's this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.

Maria Dahvana Headley

It takes bravery to care for someone — no matter who he is or what made him, whether he is weak or walking or jumping out of windows. The risk involved is enormous.

Deb Olin Unferth

I'm a strict materialist - but the police are brutal materialists.

Jack Williamson

And they need not cause you grief. As my Highland grandmother said-and she had the Sight-Tis not the dead ye have to be concerned about! Beware of the Living! And she was a wise woman. The dead are beyond your help or mine, poor things. But the living need us. Thirty souls at the least, Phryne, are still on that island to praise God who might now be angels-or devils.

Kerry Greenwood

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.

But it is never over;
nothing ends until we want it to.
Look, in shattered midnights,
On black ice under silver trees,
We are still dancing, dancing.

Gwendolyn MacEwen

So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.

The houses people live in reflect their opinions of themselves.

Joseph F. Girzone

Still, not much of a reason to live, is it? The fear of being punished for killing yourself.

My job is to ensure the sanctity of this House. Ensuring the sanity of its Master seemed like a good start.

Sometimes people do things that are complicated. For complicated reasons.

Lauren Barnholdt

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.

For chess, that superb, cold, infinitely satisfying anodyne to life, I feel the ardour of a lover, the humility of a disciple.

H. Russell Wakefield

Working in the service of the dead, biographers quit their labors only when the sole remaining task is the impossible- resurrection.

Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Isn't it interesting what a stranger can offer? A little wisdom, a little mercy, a little love.

David Ebershoff

Something I would always remember. When you forget how bad it hurts, you feel so free.

H.P. Lovecraft is for the summer between junior and senior years in high school. Cosmic fear hits you about then anyway — you realize you'll soon have to Get a Real Job or Go To College or Both and in those days, Be Drafted. A dose of Cthulhu helps put these feelings in perspective.

There should be a name for the syndrome that occurs when you're in Paris and you already miss it.

Rosecrans Baldwin

Sam took another sip of the pruno. It went down smoother this time, possibly because he no longer had feeling in his extremities.

Lawyers are like professional wrestlers. They pretend to get mad and fight, but then they socialize after a trial is over.

We can either laugh in the face of death or die trying not to.

James Grippando

Your hope is the most beautiful and the saddest in the world.

Not so deep down, we all know that safety is an illusion, that only character melds us together. That's why most of us do everything we can (healthy and unhealthy) to ward off that real feeling of standing alone so close to the edge of the world.