Novelist Quotes

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

Elinor Macartney Lane

The cast of Hamlet had not moved much. They had that haunted yet hopeful look in their eyes, like the ones you see in photographs of people crammed into steerage compartments, traveling to some new, unknown land.

Maureen Johnson

Let it simply be said that we know more about the details of the hours immediately before and the actual death of Jesus, in and near Jerusalem, than we know about the death of any other one man in all the ancient world.

I have learned in my thirty-odd years of serious writing only one sure lesson: stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.

Seán Ó Faoláin

If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable.

Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.

"You got a ninety percent chance," he said. Osno said quickly, "How do you get that figure?" He always did that whenever somebody pulled a statistic on him. He hated statisticians.

I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.

Although we strap time to our wrists, stuff it into our pockets, hang it on our walls, a perpetually moving picture for every room of the house, it can still run away, elude and evade, and show itself again only when there are minutes remaining and there is nothing left to do except wait till there are none.

No one knows how it is that with one glance a boy can break through into a girl's heart.

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

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

I never like anyone till I've seen him at his worst.

If you deny mystery-even in the guise of death-then you deny life, and you will walk like a ghost through your days, never knowing the secrets of the extremes. The deep sorrows, the absolute joys.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because were liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.

It is rather calming to remember that you really couldn't have foreseen what is happening to you.

Margaret Widdemer

In all experience, there is something to be learned. In deepest sorrow, wisdom is found. In the well of despair, hope rises.

Juliet Marillier

Nothing can stop the questing of men, not even Man. If we will it, not only the wonders of space, but the very stars are ours.

Kate and Mercer gave each other a smile with a future in it.

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

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.

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

Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there's probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime.

Alix Kates Shulman

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