Novelist Quotes

Rather like spent swimmers, who had given up the hope of rescue and then had suddenly met with it, they were sensing with all their being, the feel of the solid ground beneath their feet, the grateful monotony of the skies above their heads,... and everywhere about them the immanence of God.... The Chinaberry Tree became a Temple.

Jessie Redmon Fauset

A gaggle of old ladies is glued to the window at the end of the hall like children or jailbirds. They're spidery and frail, their hair as fine as mist. Most of them are a good decade younger than me, and this astounds me. Even as your body betrays you, your mind denies it.--There are five of them now, white headed old things huddled together and pointing crooked fingers at the glass.

He wanted to think of words that would make some difference but there were none in any language he knew that were sufficient to the moment or that would change a single thing.

I took my mother's knife and played johnny johnny johnny on the playhouse floor. I was drunk, stabbed myself every few throws. I held my hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing my blood, the way there was when I saw the red gouges onmy face that people stared at and turned away. They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was.

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

I don't have any of the answers, son. Never did. All I can do is keep asking the questions. Keep trying to make sense of why people do what they do.

Rodman Philbrick

Fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.

One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn't cancelled out by time apart. One doesn't erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they will change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.

Michael Robotham

The most fundamental pride in the world is the pride you have in owning a little piece of land! You've got to live on your own land, walk on it, work in its dirt, to know the final pride of being free.

Janice Holt Giles

We are as we are. How can you claim to know what life I was meant to lead, let alone threaten to force me into it? All your quibbling is nonsense. As well forbid your nose to snuff, or your ears to hear. We are as we do.

He hated the war; it threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind. It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy.

Irène Némirovsky

Ye'll learn perhaps that in law, a friend prosecuting is better than a friend defending!

Elinor Macartney Lane

When you became a student at Oxford you realized both your own mortality, in the flow of this near-millennium of students, and also the small particle of immortality that attaches to you when you begin to belong to an immortal place.

The ability to achieve goals is directly related to a willingness to use the wastebasket.

Barbara Hemphill

Still, even without the country or a lake, the summer was a fine thing, particularly when you were at the beginning of it, looking ahead into it. There would be months of beautifully long, empty days, and each other to play with, and the books from the library.

Riding upon the back of a waterhorse - what mortal had ever stayed in such a seat for so long? On a horse made of cold currents and liquid convergences, jests and trickery - pressed against a hide like the burnished sea of midnight, thing look different to the rider.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

But, like peace, comfort didn't come from hiding away or running away. Comfort first demanded courage.

Boredom has a tendency to bring out the worst in people's faces.

The one thing I do remember is that as I retraced my steps through all the familiar streets of my life, Inow felt completely lost.

Carolyn Mackler

We are not here in this world to drift like seaweed. Whatever intelligence we have, it is our duty to drive to the utmost.

Blanche Willis Howard

Mona's Law. That's what she calls it. She says you can have a hot job, a hot lover and a hot apartment, but you can't have all three at the same time.

Armistead Maupin

All my life, I knew, all my life I would be haunted by words from Shakespeare.

Sarah Smith (writer)

A first kiss after five months means more than a first kiss after five minutes.

Miriam realizes she is a broken vessel, pieces of her scattered everywhere. She has been finding those pieces, in their many forms, and bringing them together so she can be whole again.