Novelist Quotes

Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.

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

Lauren Barnholdt

What goes on when people overfetishize safety is that they're relapsing into that old frame of mind that what we're doing is BAD.

If you don't burn the candle at both ends, what's the candle got two ends for?

Then on your tombstone, where you only get a little bit of space to sum up your life, some wax-faced creep chisels a set of meaningless numbers instead of poetry or a secret love or the name of your favorite candy. In the end, all you get is a few words.

Scott Nicholson

We are a nation of children letting horrible things happen, and flunking Calc.

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

I'm so black they call me nighttime
When I walk along everyone looks for stars.

Sunday, that day so tedious to the triflers of earth, so full of beautiful reposes of calmness and strength for the earnest and heavenly minded.

Maria Jane McIntosh

I tell you, guilt dwells nowhere but in the eyes of the accuser. This men know even as they deny it, which is why they so often make murder their absolution. The truth of crime lies not with the victim but with the witness.

R. Scott Bakker

And still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis.

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.

The requirements of romantic love are difficult to satisfy in the back seat of a Dodge Dart.

So this is one of those times when life is just handing you something, telling you what to do, which way to go. So enjoy it. It'll be fun. I guarantee. I can't guarantee we'll find the goddamn thing, but it'll be interesting. Then if we do find it - if we do- the payoff's huge.

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

James Grippando

No one can tell, when two people walk closely together, what unconscious communication one mind may have with another

Theoretical webs, dirty webs, fusty webs, old and shrivelling away into nothingness, a fine dust.Who needs that kind of stuff. Far far better getting out into the open air and doing it, actually doing it, something solid and concrete and unconceptualisable.

I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me--a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.

There is no power in nature which from nothing could have made the universe, and none which could reduce the universe to nothing:

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.

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

The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.

For parents to restrain the inclinations of their children in marriage is an usurped power.

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

Justice requires lawyers who are prepared, witnesses who tell the truth, judges who know the law, and jurors who stay awake. Justice is the North Star, the burning bush, the holy virgin. It cannot be bought, sold, or mass produced. It is intangible, ineffable, and invisible, but if you are to spend your life in its pursuit, it is best to believe it exists, and that you can attain it.